‘Do you want us to haul Jaspar in again, see what we can find out?’
‘No. Not at this stage. I don’t want him alerted until I’ve worked out the best way to handle this. I’ll call you back if I need some help there. And again, thanks.’
By the time Derminget got back to his car, he’d worked out how to play everything: he didn’t want to alert Ayliss/McElroy either. He’d made that mistake once already. That ruled out politely asking Ayliss in under some spurious guise related to Durrant — he’d get suspicious — orputting out TV or news bulletins: if he saw them before the public pointed the finger, he’d go to ground again. The other problem was that they didn’t have a photo of the real Ayliss, and those available would probably be from seven years ago.
Derminget started up, but as he looked round to pull out, the thought suddenly hit him. He got Libreville’s number from 411, then phoned them and asked whether they might have some good security cam shots of lawyer Darrell Ayliss who’d recently visited them. ‘As close and clear as possible.’ He gave them the Eighth District e-mail to send them to, stressing the urgency. Then he phoned into Central Dispatch to put out an APB on Ayliss. ‘Photos should be with you shortly.’
Hopefully they’d get Ayliss under arrest before he knew they were even looking for him; before he knew what hit him. Then, if they’d made a big mistake, they could apologize later.
Fuck, fuck… fuck!
Nel-M was back to bashing his steering wheel as he returned to his car, having checked Truelle’s office and discovered that nobody was there, not even his secretary.
He drove over to Truelle’s Faubourg Marigny apartment, but Truelle wasn’t there either.
Fuck…. fuck! Two more steering wheel bashes, one leaving Truelle’s apartment, the other arriving back at his office. Still nobody there.
After the messy drama in Vancouver, he’d been hoping for an easy ride with this one: get Truelle out of his office on some ruse, two quick shots in a side alley, and done. Finito.
Years now he’d been looking forward to putting a bullet through Truelle’s head with impunity. No possible comebacks. And now that moment was finally here, Truelle was nowhere to be found. Sensing that everything was suddenly closing in on him, Truelle had no doubt decided to disappear until after Durrant’s death.
Truelle’s secretary obviously knew where he was; that’s why she’d hi-tailed it too. Didn’t want to stay front-line, facing all the flak.
Nel-M took out his cell-phone and called Vic Farrelia.
‘Truelle’s secretary, Cynthia? Do you have anything on tape with her full name or the district she lives in, so I could maybe track down her address?
‘I can do better than that,’ Farrelia said. ‘I picked up her full address somewhere, I’m sure. She gave it one day to a friend she hadn’t seen for a while. Give me a minute or two, I’ll try and find it.’
Twelve minutes after Farrelia’s return call, Nel-M was knocking on Cynthia’s 2 ndfloor apartment door in Bywater.
‘Who is it?’ she called out.
Nel-M didn’t answer. Then, hearing her move close to the door the other side, probably looking through the spy-hole, he barged hard against it.
‘Western…’ Another hard barge… ‘Fucking… Union!’ The lock gave way on the last barge; obviously she didn’t have Truelle’s heavy dead-bolts.
Cynthia was wide-eyed, shrieking with each barge and backing a step away, then turned to run as Nel-M finally burst through. He slammed the door behind him and caught up with her at the end of her hallway, clamping one hand over her mouth to stifle her shrieks. Breathless, sweat beads popped on his forehead, he listened out for a second for whether anyone had heard: doors opening across the corridor, footsteps coming along to investigate? But there was nothing, no movement.
Half lifting Cynthia, her shrieks and groans heavily muffled by the hand across her mouth, he bundled her into a back bedroom, shut the door.
‘Okay,’ he said, taking his gun out. ‘We can do this one of a few ways. Either you tell me straight out where your boss Truelle has gone — or after we’ve played breaking fingers or Russian roulette?’
She shook her head, lips pressed stubbornly tight as she looked anxiously between him and the gun; hoping, praying that it was a bluff.
Nel-M reached out and grabbed one of her arms, placing her hand in his, her wrist gripped tight, but his touch against her hands and fingers curiously light, soothing. He arched an eyebrow. ‘Are you sure you wanna go through this? Be a lot easier just to tell me?’
She shook her head again, though less certainly this time. She writhed and tried to wrench her hand from his grip, but he was too firm, too strong. He gripped tighter and, pushing hard back on her index finger, snapped the bone as if it was a twig.
Her howling scream was quickly muffled by his hand back over her mouth. ‘Okay, let’s try again. Where’s Truelle gone?’
But again that wide-eyed defiant stare, tears rolling down her cheeks now from the pain and from fear. He broke one more finger, her still defiant, Nel-M deciding then that she was making too much noise and it was hard for him to cover quickly with his hand over her mouth.
He tipped the bullets out of his gun, holding one up as he put it back in, then, just before sliding the barrel into her mouth, asked her again where Truelle was. Still that wide-eyed, fuck-you stare, though scrunching tight at the last second as the empty click came, her whole body shuddering. And, to Nel-M’s amazement, she managed to brave out one more empty click before her resolve finally snapped and with a breathless, ‘Okay… okay,’ she agreed to tell him.
She’d brought the appointment book with her in case someone broke into the office to read it. He shuffled her through to the lounge, one arm clamped tight around her, as she got the book and pointed out the Cuba mail box address.
Nel-M wrote it down. ‘And that’s all you have?’
‘Yeah. That’s it.’
The truth, he sensed. ‘And have you given this to anyone else?’ She started to shake her head, but as his eyes narrowed, reading her hesitance, untruth, he moved his gun towards her again.
She changed to a hasty nod. ‘Yeah… yeah. A lawyer. Ayliss… I believe that was his name.’
‘How long ago?’
She shrugged. ‘Four, maybe five hours.’
Nel-M nodded thoughtfully, absently sliding the bullets back into his gun. Cuba, four or five hours jump on him?
Cynthia’s eyes were fixed on his gun, her breath catching slightly. ‘There… there weren’t any bullets in your gun all along.’
‘I know. I palmed it.’ Nel-M smiled slyly as he slid in the last two bullets. ‘When you were a little girl, didn’t you just love surprises?’
Yanking her hair back, Nel-M put the gun barrel back in her mouth and pulled the trigger.
‘Yep, I managed to dig up something,’ Stratton said. ‘Mercedes 300SL lifted from a driveway on 4 thStreet, just two houses in from Coliseum, while a couple were away on holiday. They apparently already had a Jaguar and a Caddy in the garage, that’s why the car was out.’
‘Sounds promising.’ Jac had decided to use his time waiting for flight-boarding to make his follow-up calls. He’d tried Mack Elliott’s number to see if he’d recalled anything yet — no answer — then he’d called Stratton. ‘And it happened the same night as Jessica Roche’s murder?’
‘That’s the thing that can’t be said for sure. The couple, the Lapointes, were away for ten days, and from the police report the neighbours were vague on when the car went missing. Closest it can be nailed down to is two days before the night of the murder or three days after. But there’s at least a chanceit went down that same night.’ Stratton sucked in his breath. ‘Thing is, that’s the only recorded crime close by that could have been that night. It’s either that, or nothing.’