Blood Lies (18 page)

Of average height and with a slight paunch, Drew Isaacs wore jeans and an untucked floral shirt with the top two buttons undone and sleeves rolled up. He had flowing, shoulder-length brown hair peppered with gray and a beard, but unlike mine his was kept trimmed short and limited to the front of his chin. To me, he looked like an aging rock star.

I rose from my seat and extended a hand to him. Ignoring it, Isaacs threw his arms around me and drew me into a tight hug. “Good to see you, man,” he said warmly, as he released me from his grip with a slap to my back. “Been too long.”

“You, too, Drew,” I said, willing the acid to stay in my stomach. “I like your hair.”

He ran a hand back through his thick mane. “It’s how the women like it these days.”

I mustered a laugh. “On them, or you?”

His expression hardened a moment. I wondered if I’d pushed my old boy routine too far, but then he broke into a smile that turned into a laugh. “Shit, Aaron. I’ve missed you.”

He dropped down across from me in the booth. He hailed the waiter, who greeted him by name, and ordered a Stoli vodka on the rocks. I ordered another beer.

“So where are you living now?” Isaacs asked.

“You know…” I shrugged, searching for the most plausible answer. “Probably better if I don’t say.”

He bit his lip and nodded. “I guess that’s right.”

I sipped my beer while I searched Isaacs’s face for a hint of suspicion or recognition, but I saw none. “Drew, am I still as unpopular around here as ever?”

“Oh, yeah,” He stretched out the words. “These guys don’t forget five million dollars easily. But I think they’re convinced you really are dead now.” He raised an eyebrow. “If I were you? I wouldn’t give them a chance to think otherwise.”

“Maglio?” I said, taking a stab.

“Among others.”

“That Whistler deal really went to shit, huh?” I said with a sigh, as if reminiscing on the old days.

“Maglio took a bath.”

“He blames me, doesn’t he?”

Isaac’s head seesawed from side to side. “Not just you.”

“Emily, too?”

“Emily broke the golden rule.” Isaacs pointed his glass at me. “You have to keep your nose clean when doing business. Bringing coke and E and all that crap to a launch party…” He shook his head. “A rookie mistake. And it pretty much sunk the development.”

“Maglio was really pissed, huh?” I played along as if dissecting a ball game my home team had lost. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved Emily. She was basically my sister-in-law, but it seems to me she got a bit of a free pass out of the whole mess.”

“Of course.”

“What do you mean ‘of course’?”

Isaacs held up his palms. “No disrespect to your brother, but how do you think she got the job in the first place?”

“They weren’t…”

“Emily was fucking the boss.”

Suppressing a wince, I nodded. “I should have figured.”

“Maglio even brought that big hitter attorney of his up here to get Emily out of jail after she was busted.”

The remark hit me like a punch. “Michael Prince?” I blurted a little too quickly.

Isaacs squinted in surprise. “Yeah, he’s the guy.”

“I had no idea he was involved,” I said as much to myself as Isaacs.

“Very involved. I heard Prince was even one of the investors in Whistler.”

That son of a bitch!
But I nodded as if I knew it all along. “Drew, do you think Maglio might have killed Emily?”

Isaacs smiled knowingly. “That’s what you’ve come back to Vancouver to find out, huh?”

“Among other things.” I shrugged. “I just thought if Emily lost Maglio tens of millions at Whistler—”

Isaacs shook his head with certainty. “But that’s not what sent him over the edge!”

“No? What did?”

“Word was that Maglio went ballistic when Emily was diagnosed.”

“
Diagnosed
?”

“AIDS.”

It was all I could do to keep my jaw off the floor. “Are you saying Emily gave Maglio HIV?”

I stumbled back to the YMCA still reeling from my meeting with Isaacs. Overwhelmed by his disclosure that Emily exposed Maglio to HIV, I completely forgot to use the lines and gestures I’d rehearsed beforehand, but Isaacs never once seemed to doubt that I was anyone but Aaron.

Lying in bed, my head spun as I sorted through Isaacs’s revelations: Aaron absconding with five million dollars of drug money, Prince’s involvement in Whistler, and Emily sleeping with Maglio and perhaps infecting him with HIV.

After a fitful sleep, punctuated by nightmares about missed exams and missed diagnoses in the ER, I woke up at 5:15, impatient for dawn to break. By six o’clock, I deemed it light enough for a ride. I grabbed the bike and lugged it down the stairs and out to the street. As I stepped onto the street, my breath froze in the air. Without my Lycra riding jacket and pants, the coldness of the morning seeped through to my bones, but the chill invigorated me. I jumped on the bike. A couple of hills later, I’d already begun to warm up.

Pumping the pedals hard, I rode out around the University and along the southern border of the city beside the Fraser River. I rode past the column of rush-hour cars and trucks, their brakes and tires squeaking in a staccato of stop-and-go noises and their exhaust fumes misting the air, as I headed south over the river on the Oak Street Bridge and into the suburb of Richmond. I would have continued cycling to the American border had I not a full morning’s work awaiting me. Reluctantly, I stopped and turned back for home.

I locked the bike out front of the YMCA and ran up the stairs to my room. After a quick shower and change, I returned to the lobby, but I no longer had the floor to myself. At the phone booth, a guy with a ponytail leaned against the wall with his jacket off, obviously settled in for a long call. Across the room, I saw my bald neighbor waving and trying to hail me over. I pointed at my watch and yelled, “Sorry, Ray, I’m late.” I jogged for the door.

I unlocked my bike and rode to the clinic. Arriving at 7:45, I found the door open and Edith already seated behind her desk, but the waiting room was empty. I summoned my best top-of-the-morning smile. “I kind of assumed the patients began lining up at four
A.M.
,” I said.

“They’ll come at eight,” she grumbled without looking up from her computer. “They always do.”

“Okay, well, I’m going to grab a coffee,” I said. “Do you want—”

“No,” she cut me off. She flashed her catlike green eyes at me, her lips fighting back a scowl. “And Dr. Horvath, if you want a chart, ask me for it next time.”

“Will do,” I chirped. I wondered if Joe had told Edith that I’d been nosing around her space for charts, but I decided that she probably had hidden cameras, tripwires, body heat sensors, or more likely some kind of witch’s crystal ball that let her know.

I walked out to the pay phone on the street corner, dialed Alex’s cell number, and again reversed the charges.

“Ben?”

Her one syllable conjured a mix of relief and melancholy in me. “Alex, where are you?”

“A gas station in Renton,” she said, referring to the suburb southeast of Seattle. “What’s the latest?”

“Don’t know you’d believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

I gave her the lowdown on my meeting with Drew Isaacs.

“Oh my God,” she said slowly. “Maybe Aaron
is
still alive!”

“Maybe.” Without thinking, I touched the side of the cold sticky pay phone. “But with or without Maglio, I still have no clue how Aaron’s blood got onto Emily’s wall.”

“You’re making progress,” she soothed, but then her tone hardened. “Listen, Ben, last night Detective Sutcliffe came by the ER to see me again.”

I straightened up and glanced over either shoulder, as if suddenly watched. “Just Rick? No Helen?”

“He was alone.”

I tasted acid. “What did he want?”

“To know if you had contacted me.”

“And?”

“What do you think?” Alex said with a trace of indignation. “I told him I hadn’t seen or heard from you since that day at the coffee shop.”

“Did he believe you?”

“Think so. He asked me some questions about your parents, and whether you had relatives outside of King County. He wanted to know if you had any favorite getaways or escapes.” She uttered a soft-pitched laugh. “I was singularly unhelpful.”

“I bet he never shed that hundred-kilowatt smile of his,” I grumbled, irrationally resentful at the thought of Rick spending time alone with Alex.

“Not once.”

I changed hands on the receiver and took another scan around the phone booth. “You don’t think Marcus tipped him off, do you?”

She hesitated. “If he did, then why would Rick come to see me? Wouldn’t he already be looking for you up there?”

“I guess,” I said, unconvinced.

“Oh, Ben,” she said with a sigh, and the intimacy in her voice tugged at my heart. “Marcus has always been a bit jealous of our relationship, but I can’t see him turning you in.”

I could, but I kept the thought to myself. Eager to change subjects, I asked, “How’s Talie?”

She was quiet a moment. “Marcus is taking her on Saturday for her first full week with him.”

“It’s going to work out, Alex.” I suppressed a groan at the hollowness of my reassurance.

“I know,” she said, sounding more like her old self. “Talie will cope. I’ll cope. It’ll even give me a chance to tackle the list of the hundred things I’ve meant to do around the house.”

“There you go.”

“We need to get moving, Ben,” she said, suddenly all business. “I’m turning your cell on now. Call me right back.”

With a quick glance, I ensured no one was waiting for the pay phone and then I called my number collect. Alex accepted the charges. “Okay. Hang on, I’ll get her.” The line clicked once. When it clicked a second time, I heard the phone ringing.

Helen answered on the next ring. “Sergeant Riddell.”

“Helen, it’s Ben.”

“Oh, we’re playing this game again, are we?”

“This is no game.”

“My thoughts exactly. So what the hell is the point of these hide-and-go-seek phone calls?”

“To try to convince you that I’m innocent.”

“If you want to do that, Benjamin, come sit down in my office and convince me.”

“Can’t.”

“Because you’re not?”

“Because you refuse to believe it’s possible I am,” I snapped. I took a big breath, swallowing the rest of my anger. “I need to tell you something.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Did you know that Philip Maglio and Emily used to be an item?”

There was a slight pause. “Go on.”

“Emily was the sales director on a big NorWesPac resort development. It all fell apart and cost Maglio a fortune, in large part because of Emily’s drug habit.” I gave her the details without mentioning Whistler specifically, as I didn’t want to point her in my vicinity. “Apparently, Maglio took it a lot harder when he found out later that Emily had exposed him to HIV.”

She didn’t comment. I imagined she was busy scrambling the troops to trace my call.

“His money
and
his health!” I stressed. “How’s that for motive, Helen?”

“I’ll give you this, it’s quite a yarn.”

“But not worth looking into?”

“Of course it is!” Helen said. “I would investigate Philip Maglio for an outstanding parking meter violation if I thought there was a chance of nailing him.”

“So you’ll follow it up?”

“What makes you think I haven’t been looking into other suspects all along?” Helen sounded disappointed in me.

“I assumed you’d focused exclusively on me.”

“You assumed wrong, Benjamin. Problem is that the search for you is consuming so much of our time and resources that it’s hard to concentrate on anything else. Understand?”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling apologetic.

“Granted, you’ve turned into a regular Sam Spade.” She couldn’t resist a chuckle. “I never realized fugitives had so much leisure time. I pictured you holed up in a cave with Osama bin Laden.”

“Yeah, it’s nothing but caviar and champagne. You ought to give it a whirl.”

“You can’t have investigated this all on your own.” Her tone stiffened. “You’re getting help, aren’t you?”

I didn’t reply.

“Please listen to me, Benjamin. If you piss off people like Maglio, and they get to you before we do, a bum murder rap will suddenly seem like a minor inconvenience by comparison.”

“I know,” I said, aware that Helen’s remark came from protectiveness, not manipulation.

The line beeped three times with Alex’s warning signal.

“Aaron is alive, Helen.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“No, but I spoke to someone who had drinks with him a full year after you found his burned-out BMW.”

“Who?”

“I can’t say tell—”

The line clicked and the connection was gone.

Pacing back and forth by the phone booth, I gave Alex five minutes to clear out of the gas station before I called her back on her own cell number. “Did you get out okay?”

“No problem,” she said. “I took off the moment I saw the first flashing light. I drove right by the cruisers heading the other way.”

“Good. Do you have call number blocking on your cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Perfect. Can we use your phone to relay one more call?”

“To?” she asked suspiciously.

“Philip Maglio.”

“Maglio? You heard what Helen said about him. You think this is wise?”

“Let’s find out.”

I gave her the number and a quick tutorial on how to record calls on her cell phone. She put me on hold. A moment later, Maglio’s receptionist Megan answered in her singsong voice. When I introduced myself again as “J. D. Emily,” she laughed and said, “As in the poet, right? Please hold a moment, Mr. Emily.”

More than a minute passed before the line clicked. “Phil Maglio,” he growled in his gravelly baritone.

“Phil, we spoke last week.”

“No shit.”

I pictured the tight jaw and fuming gray eyes from his photo. “I wanted to ask you about Whistler,” I said.

The cool silence that followed was broken by his wet cough. “What about it?”

“I heard that you got shafted and ended up losing a lot of money on SnowView.”

“So?” he grumbled. “That’s the development business for you. Rarely a day goes by when somebody doesn’t screw me, or vice versa.”

“Yeah, but in this case we’re talking about Emily Kenmore,” I said. “Somebody you were screwing
outside
the office.”

“You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“No?” I said. “I’m talking about the woman who upended your dream development with her careless drug habit.” I paused. “The same woman who exposed you to HIV.”

The line went dead quiet. The receiver could have frozen in my hands.

“Phil?” I said after a moment.

“Do you have any idea how dangerous I can be?” he hissed.

“Oh, I think I do,” I said with feigned indifference, though my heart was hammering. “I saw the photos of Emily’s bedroom in the paper. I saw what you did to them.”

He coughed into the receiver and then loudly cleared his throat. “Haven’t you heard? The cops already know who killed those two.”

“But I know better. And so do you.”

“You don’t know your ass from your elbow,” he grunted. “I’m not sure who is feeding you this line of bullshit, but I do know this: It’s not good for your health.”

“Phil, we both know—”

“Listen to me.” He cut me off. “You’re as big a pain in the ass as your brother was.”

I felt winded.

“Next time you want to talk to me,
Ben
”—the use of my name shot a chill through me—“we’ll do it face to face.”