Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle (80 page)

“Any children?”

She gave him a blank look.

“Did he have any children?”

She shook her head. “There was a little boy. He was stillborn.”

Stillborn
. Dan counted back. He couldn’t possibly be old enough, in any case. No matter. He was pretty sure he already knew what he needed to know. It was so obvious, he couldn’t see how he’d missed it.

“I’m still curious about his interest in Jags Rohmer,” Dan said, leading her here and there, wondering how long till she told him the rest.

“You may be right in thinking my son had an obsession with Jags. I know I certainly did.”

Past tense on both counts. He had to give her credit for playing the game well.

She was smiling, looking back in time. Being totally candid for once. The drugs, the alcohol, and maybe the importance of the situation conspired to make her let down her guard. Who knew how long it had been since she’d been completely candid about anything?

He’d looked her up on the Internet. The IMDb site for actors and directors listed her credits. If the information was to be believed, she was fifty-nine. Not so old, but it placed her in her mid-thirties when she’d had her son. Her film career had spanned a mere five years, before she’d married. Her fame was brief, apart from one long-lived flame that everyone seemed to remember. It hadn’t been hard to figure out how old she was when she met Jags Rohmer.

“You weren’t really from Jags’ world, were you? He was from a rough and seedy counterculture, while you were well brought up, I think. A real lady.”

A smiled crept over her face, the memory playing itself out.

“Yes, I was a lady. It’s how I was raised. My family was quite well off. When I met Jags and entered his world, I had no idea how to behave. You have no idea what it was like to go from my world to his.”

“Is that why your son blamed Jags for your addiction?”

“Did he?” She looked off now, trying to piece together the fragments of her past. “That may be true. Yes, I can see why he may have thought that.”

Dan waited for her to go on. The smile had left her now. Her playful expression collapsed.

“I know I didn’t blame him. I … I don’t think I did, anyway.” She turned to him, wanting his understanding. “You had to know the times. They were different then.”

“That’s what Jags said.”

Her face lit up. “Did he? Yes, of course. We did such extreme things. It seemed natural to us then.”

Dan waited.

She laughed again. “How could you blame someone like that?”

“That’s just what I was wondering. How could anyone blame Jags Rohmer?” He shook his head, as though perplexed. “Do you know?”

Fear edged her eyes. She was fighting remarkably hard. A Herculean effort.
Impressive
, Dan thought,
even if it was just an actor’s trick
. Who could say what was real and what not when your brain and your sense of morality were so fogged by drugs?

“Did you ever leave Jags with your son unattended for any length of time?”

She shook her head impatiently. “No. Never. He wasn’t even born when I knew Jags.”

Dan stared at her. She understood what she’d told him. She stood shakily.

“I think …”

“So they never actually met?”

She gripped the back of her chair and shook her head. The word came as a whisper: “No.”

She brushed her hair from her face. He waited and watched. Her expressions came and went with such rapidity. How could you ever know a woman like that?

“Does the name Gaetan Bélanger mean anything to you?”

She appeared to be trying to recollect something, gathering the thoughts from some other time. Finally, she shook her head. “No. Nothing.”

He mentioned the other name, the one posted on the website several hours earlier. Again, she shook her head. He believed her. It probably wasn’t even real.

He slid his hand inside his jacket and pulled out the photograph he’d picked up in the other room, laying it on its back. Three figures filled the frame. The first was a boy in a blue blazer: Little Boy Blue, looking at most a few years younger than he appeared today. It was remarkable. The second was a man in a police uniform. An arm lay around the boy’s shoulder. His resemblance to Constable Pfeiffer was impossible to deny. The third figure was the man who had recently become the chief of police.

Dan nodded toward the picture.

“Recognize them?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?” Fear clouded her handsome features. “Where did you get this?”

Dan interrupted, pointing to the boy and the man with his arm around his shoulder. “Would I be correct in thinking them father and son?”

She looked confused for a moment. Then her eyes closed. She turned her face away.

“Yes.”

Her voice was dusky. The leading lady steeling herself for the dénouement, the explosive finale.

“And this man?” Dan asked, pointing to the other.

“He was … a friend of the family.”

“Did he know what was going on?”

“Not at first.”

Her hands were trembling. Dan waited. He didn’t dare move, didn’t dare breathe till it was over. You can make yourself believe almost anything, he knew.

“Some things are hard to accept, aren’t they?” Dan asked. “I expect that there are some things you can’t say to anybody. Not even to yourself.”

She reached out and took his hand across the table. She wasn’t acting now. “Then don’t. Don’t say it.”

“It’s simpler to make up the truth, isn’t it? To create stories?”

Dan waited. She sobbed.

“It happened to him, too, didn’t it?”

Would she be able to admit it? The eyes were withdrawn. Drugs may have been able to numb her senses, but they couldn’t kill the memories.

Finally, she spoke. “Yes. It happened to him. It was
my fault.” The tears were falling. She looked up, focusing directly on him. Accusing the accuser. “That’s what you wanted to hear, wasn’t it?”

Dan nodded. “Will you come with me to the police station?” he asked.

Everything was arranged. Coffee cups sat on the table between them. All that remained was to call Jags. It would help smooth things over in case anyone was listening in, which Dan thought likely. In all probability, there would be more than one interested party waiting to hear what he was about to say.

He picked up on the first ring.

“Hey, Jags. It’s Dan. Where are you?”

There was a hesitation.
It’s okay, buddy
, Dan thought.
I wouldn’t trust me either
.

Finally, Jags answered. “I’m at the penthouse,” he said. “What did you find out? Did she tell you anything?”

Dan spoke clearly and slowly. “I’ll tell you everything when we meet. I want you to meet me on the island. We need to have a little talk. Just you and me. What time works best for you?”

Jags took his time answering. He seemed to be thinking it over.
This is where it all fucks up
, Dan thought.

Then Jags spoke. “Around four o’clock should be okay. Have you got the key to my place, in case you get there first?”

“Yes, I have the key. I’ll let myself in.”

“Good. I’ll see you there.” A pause. “This better be worth it.”

“It will be.”

Jags hung up. Dan waited. Maybe he was just being paranoid, but you never knew. He thought he heard a very faint click on the line right before it went dead.

The island seemed to waver in the distance, that insubstantial bit of sand that had floated downstream and accumulated for hundreds of years. Did nothing stay put? Coils of mist eddied up from the dark water as he motored along the estuary between the islands, found an empty dock and leapt out. It was late enough in the season that he needn’t worry about some angry cottager showing up and making a fuss. Even if they did, who cared?

Next to the dock, three children playing at being sailors in an old beached rowboat. Dan watched as they jumped in and out, pretending the sand was water and that they were drowning or swimming, whichever action seemed appropriate to their character. No one was content just being themselves these days.

He climbed up the bank, feeling the sand shift beneath his feet till he reached the sidewalk. He followed Dacotah Avenue till he came to Jags Rohmer’s island retreat. It could be such a handy little place, he thought. Except for the inconvenience of getting over here and the isolation that made it a natural death trap.

He stood on the porch and looked around. All was quiet except for the drone of a plane coming in for a landing at the island airport. His cell rang. He put the phone to his ear and listened for a moment before pocketing it again. He let himself in with his key, leaving the door unlocked.

“Hello?” he called out. “It’s Dan, Jags. Are you here?”

No response.
Good
.

He sat and waited. A clock ticked so loudly it began to get on his nerves. He felt jittery. So many things could go wrong. Timing was crucial. He knew they had the ferries covered. There were scanners in place on all the docks. If he came armed, they would know.

His nerves were getting the better of him. He went over to the bookshelves. He’d been too distracted to pay attention to them the last time he was here. Now he read with fascination: there were titles obscure and erudite. Here were first editions of Darwin and Freud, Dickens and Mann, political tracts that had spawned revolutions and scientific treatises that had cured previously incurable diseases. If Dan had walked into anyone else’s home and found such a collection, he’d have thought it a put-on, that they’d been purchased along with the house rather than collected. But not Jags Rohmer.

Here was the source of Jags’ impressive lyric-writing
skills, his erudition and the range of subjects he tackled.
A title caught his eye. Dan reached up to grasp a leather spine on the top shelf. It was a seventeenth-century tract on sexual psychosis, with chapters on every supposed sexual deviance, fetish, and the various sexualities once classified as “insanities.”

“
The sexually insane may number in the thousands
,” Dan read. “
They are everywhere around us and are adept at hiding their unnatural urges from even the most highly trained professional. They may be hiding among your colleagues, or
” — shock and awe — “
even hidden within your own family …
”

He turned the page on a diagram of a tall, thin man in evening dress staring at a fit young man in working garb like a mongoose studying a cobra. The irresistible will of perversion.

“
They may be known by various names: inverts, sodomists, homosexualists, paedophiles …
”

The book was a fetishist’s wet dream, an orgy of foreplay.
All that repression needed an outlet
, Dan reasoned. He placed it back on the shelf and pulled out another volume.

He’d been there half an hour when footsteps app-
roached, crossed the porch, and entered the cottage by the front door.

Dan’s phone rang again, giving him a jolt. He looked around the corner and held up a warning finger.

“Sharp.”

He listened for a moment, a frown forming on his face. He hung up without a word and turned back to the new arrival.

“There’s no sign of him on any of the ferries. He may have come by water taxi. We’ll just have to wait.”

He looked out at the mist-covered lawn, the darkness gathering under the trees.

“Will he be safe…?”

Dan shrugged.

“They promised not to shoot him.”

“Oh, god, I hope not. He’s all I’ve got left.”

Dan gestured to a sofa. “Have a seat,” he said.

The clock ticked menacingly. They tried not to look at one another. Dan kept his eyes peeled for an approach across the lawn. That was the way he’d come, he felt sure. He would assume there was no need to hide or slip in through the trees on either side of the cottage. Dan had promised to deliver what he wanted.

A floorboard creaked somewhere upstairs.

No. Was it possible?

They waited, but not for long. The legs appeared first, followed by the blue blazer. Dan held his breath as the figure he knew as Little Boy Blue appeared before them. Holding a crossbow cocked and ready.

For a moment, his sense of reality failed.
Rule Number Nine: The villain is never who you think it is
.

Dan felt a hand grip his own.

He’s not dead
, he thought, as the figure descended one step at a time.

But of course, he wasn’t dead. It was Gaetan Bélanger who was dead, no matter what the papers reported about the martyrdom of a heroic police officer, the gun found beneath the badly burned body.
No matter what anyone believed, it was Bélanger who’d died that night, or maybe even the day before, while Little Boy Blue had escaped via the back door, giving him just enough time to return as Constable Pfeiffer and start the fire himself, waiting till the camera feed died before slipping away unseen.

Somehow Pfeiffer had fooled them all again. He’d gotten here first. Maybe he’d been here since the night before, waiting for Jags to arrive.

They watched as a hand reached up and brushed the girlish nose, almost knocking the school cap from his head. The transformation was remarkable. Clean-shaven, with his hair combed down over his forehead,
you might have mistaken him for his fourteen-year-old self, the boy in the photograph. The same boy, a
decade earlier, standing with his father on one of
a handful of supervised visits. Anyone else might have accepted the make-believe that this was just a schoolboy come out for a bit of truancy, casing a rock star’s home while he was out. Only this was a man, not a boy.

Pfeiffer looked from one to the other of them. Rage consumed his features. He glared at Dan. “You shouldn’t have done this.”

“Pierre …” his mother said.

“Shut up!”

He swung the crossbow around. One arrow. Whose heart would it pierce? Whose red, red breast?

They sat there, unmoving. No one seemed to know what to do. The cellphone startled all of them. Dan feared for a moment that Pfeiffer’s finger might slip accidentally. He looked to him for a sign.

“Go ahead,” Pfeiffer said. “They’re expecting you to answer. Just be very careful what you say.”