THREE TIMES A LADY (22 page)

In a perfect world, Nicholas would have marched directly out into the middle of the dance floor and put a bullet into Dinah Leach’s worthless temple right then and there.  Sadly, though, this wasn’t a perfect world.  Not even close.  Not yet, at least. 

But Nicholas was working on it.

Besides, killing Dinah Leach in that manner would have been going against Annabeth Preston’s very specific plans for the woman, and frail as the old gal might be these days, Nicholas knew she’d hoist him up by his shirt collar and hang him by the back of his neck on one of the sharp steel hooks in the butcher’s shop back home if he deviated even one
iota
from her very specific instructions.  So for now he’d just need to wait a little bit longer before introducing any exciting new wrinkles to her script.

But those wrinkles were coming.  Boy, were they coming.  Just
wait
until Annabeth Preston saw what Nicholas had planned for
her
.

The heavy bass coming from the nightclub’s speakers punched like fists into Nicholas’s chest, making him wish he could punch it back. 
Doosh-doosh-doosh-doosh.
  After several minutes of this, the song finally switched to
Stronger
by Kanye West, and out on the dance floor, Dinah Leach gleefully succumbed to the renewed dry-humping foisted upon her by her three thuggish-ruggish friends, who seemed much more confident in their dance moves now that a fellow brother was supplying the beat. 

When
Stronger
faded away itself and gave way to Justin Bieber’s
Girlfriend
, Dinah Leach at last disengaged herself from the panting pack.  Crestfallen looks coloured in the faces of her dance-mates as they watched her walk away.  Three necks swiveled on three sets of powerful shoulders.  Six bloodshot eyes immediately scanned the dance floor in search of another willing whore with whom they could get their respective grooves on.

Nicholas chuckled to himself and checked his watch again in the strobe lights flashing overhead.  He let a full thirty seconds pass before following Dinah Leach to the bar at a discrete distance.  Wasn’t all that difficult in the packed nightclub.  But to hell with all the foreplay already, right?  He was ready to get his
own
groove on.

Fighting his way through the bumping and grinding going on out on the dance floor, Nicholas shouldered his way up to the long bar lined with people and readied himself for what would come next.  Any nervousness he’d been feeling earlier in the night had dissipated completely now.  In its place, a calm like none he’d ever experienced before had settled over him like a mother’s warm and comforting embrace.

Or at least what he
imagined
a mother’s warm and comforting embrace must feel like.

Nicholas took in a deep breath through his nostrils and sidled up next to Dinah Leach at the bar.  Almost time for the payoff.  Just a little bit longer now.  And the clock was still ticking.  Could Dinah Leach hear it yet?

Nicholas closed his eyes.  Of course she couldn’t.  But
he
sure as hell could.

Tick, tick, tick…

D
ana finally left the coroner’s office through the front doors and stepped outside into the frigid winter air, flipping open her cellphone and punching in the number for Bill Krugman down in Washington, DC. 

Dana didn’t want to wait until she got back to the car to hear her boss’s voice.  She wanted to know that he and Marie were OK
now
.  Marie Krugman’s first chemotherapy session had been scheduled for today, and her current medical condition marked one of the scariest for women all around the world, bringing on a profound and universal sense of dread no matter what country you lived in or what language you spoke.  Any way you cut it, breast cancer was no joke.

A howling wind gusted in off Lake Erie and sliced hard through Dana’s body as the phone began to ring on Krugman’s end, whipping her short blonde hair wildly around her head and chilling her right down to her bone marrow.  Though Dana’s main reason for calling Krugman was to check up on Marie’s condition, she also wanted to
bring the Director up to speed on what was going on out in Cleveland and receive his blessing to send the autopsy-room video to the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division down in Clarksburg, West Virginia.  The Bureau was in the midst of a billion-dollar project to compile the world’s largest database of suspects’ physical characteristics, and Dana hoped the technicians stationed in the foothills of Appalachia could match up the face of the woman in the video to an existing face already on record.  The hope of those in charge of the FBI’s sweeping new project was that in the next few years or so law-enforcement officials would be able to access the biometric information – including iris patterns, face shapes, scars, even the way people
walked and talked
– to crack cases and identify terrorists and fugitives.  More than a million images of fingerprints, irises and faces of Iraqi and Afghan detainees had been collected over the past two years alone, and domestically that number wasn’t very far behind.  As things stood currently, the FBI maintained fifty-five
million
sets of electronic fingerprints.  A possible match was made or ruled out somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred thousand times a day.  So any way you looked at it, it wasn’t a small-potatoes operation by any stretch of the imagination.

Dana turned her face away from the bitter wind as the Director finally picked up his phone.  ‘Agent Whitestone,’ he said immediately.  ‘What’s wrong?  Is everything OK?  Are
you
OK?’

Krugman’s concern touched Dana.  Ever since she’d lost both James Whitestone and Crawford Bell to murder at the hands of the same bloodthirsty lunatic who’d very nearly ended
her
life too, he’d been the closest thing to a father figure that she had in this world.  ‘I’m just fine, sir,’ she said, wanting to put him at ease as quickly as possible.  ‘Almost back to a hundred per cent now.  More importantly, how is Marie feeling?’

Krugman blew out a slow breath.  His deep voice didn’t crack, but it came close enough to make Dana wince.  ‘Worse than we expected, I’m afraid.  Apparently, the cancer’s more aggressive than we first thought.  They’ve already doubled the number of her chemo sessions every week.  It’ll be a long time until we’re safely out of the woods.’

Dana gasped.  ‘Oh my God, sir.  That’s awful.’

Krugman sighed.  ‘Yeah, but what can you do about it?  It is what it is.  Anyway, what else is going on?  You never call me this late unless it’s about work.  Don’t tell me you’re back on the clock already.’

Dana blew out a slow breath.  As quickly as she could, she filled in the Director on the details of Christian Manhoff’s brutal murder.  Then she told Krugman about the mystery woman in the autopsy-room video.

Krugman grunted into the mouthpiece when she’d finished bringing him up to speed.  ‘By all means send in the video,’ he said.  ‘But I want you to have backup on this one.  I don’t like the idea of you getting called out by name again, Agent Whitestone.  And it’s standard operating procedure to team up when something like that happens.  You should know that by now.’

Dana let out a relieved breath, happy Krugman wasn’t giving her a hard time about jumping back into work so soon after emerging from her coma.  Thank God for the small mercies.  ‘I do, sir.  Who did you have in mind?’

Krugman paused.  After a moment, he said, ‘Bruce Blankenship.  Works out of our field office in Nebraska.  Something of a technological wizard, from all reports.  Might come in handy with this autopsy-video mystery.  In any event, I’ll forward him your contact information and instruct him to call you in the morning.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Don’t mention it.  And Agent Whitestone?’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Promise me you won’t overdo it out there.’

‘OK, I promise.’

Krugman blew out another breath.  ‘Why don’t I believe you?’

‘Probably because you’re a very smart man.’

‘Luckily for you, flattery will get you everywhere.’

Dana chatted with her boss for another moment or two before switching off the connection with him and glancing around the mostly deserted parking lot.  Other than a few scattered cars and two men in overalls who were loading boxes into the back of the coroner’s office building, everything looked typically Cleveland to her at the moment.  In other words: cold and gray and dark.

Fishing her car keys out of her purse, Dana made her way over to her Protégé parked twenty yards away, concentrating on navigating the black ice beneath her feet as she went.  Reaching her car a moment later, she inserted the proper key into the lock and twisted until the locking mechanism disengaged.  Then she slid behind the wheel and reached over to pull shut the door against the soul-numbing cold.  That’s when she looked up to see the two men dressed in overalls who’d been loading boxes into the back of the coroner’s office building a moment earlier standing directly over her.

‘Hey, bitch,’ said the taller of the two men.  ‘What’s a fine piece of ass like you doing out here all by herself on a night like this?  Don’t you know that it’s
dangerous
out here?’

Dana shot her hand inside her jacket for her Glock 17, but by then it was already too late.  The smaller of the two men shot out his own hand and twisted her left wrist around hard.  A searing jolt of pain rocketed up Dana’s arm as the taller of the pair moved forward and pressed a damp white cloth over her mouth and nose.  A medicinal smell filled her nostrils.  Her brain went fuzzy.  A moment later, everything around her went pitch-black.  Chloroform, Dana supposed – a favourite prop of all the bad guys in the movies.

As Dana’s world slowly floated away, in her mind’s eye she and Jeremy Brown were riding through New York City’s Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage.  Jeremy was just leaning in for their first kiss when an even sharper pain between Dana’s thighs replaced the agonising pain in her arm, snapping her mind back into the horrifying present. 

A horrifying present in which two men dressed in blue overalls were brutally raping her in the otherwise-deserted parking lot of the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office.

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

‘
Named for
Huracan
, the Carib god of evil, hurricanes are amazing and destructive natural phenomena that occur 40 to 50 times worldwide each year.  Hurricane season takes place in the Atlantic, Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico and Central Pacific from 1 June to 30 November, while in the Eastern Pacific the season stretches from 15 May to 30 November.’ – Matt Rosenberg, in his article,
Terror of the Coasts
.

Directly to Nicholas’s right, Dinah Leach leaned her lithe body over the bar at Johnny’s Hideaway and attempted to catch a bartender’s attention. 

He studied her face closely from the corner of his eye before stealing a quick peek down the front of her blouse.  From the look of things, she was trying to trade in on her small measure of notoriety for some faster service. 
Presumptuous bitch
.  Did she really think she was better than everyone else in the nightclub?  Better than
him
?  If so, then she’d better enjoy it while she still could.  Because pretty soon she’d never feel
anything
again.

Nicholas cocked his head in Dinah Leach’s direction as she leaned her glistening body even farther across the long bar, showing off her impressive cleavage to a male bartender.  Worked like a charm.  Then again, where was the big surprise in that?  Good boob jobs tended to draw their fair share of attention, and Dinah Leach had a
great
boob job.  Twenty thousand bucks, at a bare minimum, and Nicholas would know.  Smart business move for her when you looked at things honestly.

Nicholas strained his ears and caught the whore’s words above the deafening music.  She was ordering just one more drink before tabbing out for the night.

‘Vodka and Red Bull,’ she shouted, favouring the bartender with a seductive smile and a slight shimmy of her silicone hooters.  ‘Easy on the Red Bull.’

The bartender nodded, then stole his own furtive peek down the front of her blouse before moving away quickly to prepare her drink.  Thirty seconds later, the reality-television star was throwing back her head and draining the booze in four quick swallows. 

From this distance, Nicholas could actually
hear
the ice cubes banging up against her veneer-covered front teeth.  He cut his gaze down to the bill lying on the beer-soaked bar and lifted up his eyebrows.  Two hundred and twelve bucks, not counting tip.  An impressive night of drinking by anyone’s measure. 

Curious, he watched Dinah Leach fill in the line for the gratuity.  Another forty bucks for the leering bartender.  And why not?  What did
she
care?  It was all just dirty paper to her, right?

With the woman standing no more than two feet away from him now, Nicholas realised how much
older
she looked in person than on television.  Her face a little more haggard, her features a little more drawn, the wrinkles around her mouth a bit more pronounced.