Donner shook his head, but that didn’t hide the tiny beads of sweat beginning to appear on his forehead. “This really is a pretty fanciful group of conjectures, don’t you think?”
“What if everything you say is true?” Joan said, her eyes cutting toward the door. “There’s still no reason to hold me. I haven’t committed any crime. And I really must be going.”
For a moment Joan assumed the icy confidence Hannibal was accustomed to. She stood, smoothed down her skirt and moved as if she would walk past Hannibal and out the door. Hannibal pulled his gun in beside his waist and cocked his right fist.
“Him I’ll shoot if I have to,” Hannibal said. “You I’d just knock down. Remember my job is to save Dean Edwards, and nothing bad happened to him until you moved the knife.”
“What?” Donner stared at Joan, as if waiting for her to explain.
“Nobody else went into Dean’s apartment over your garage who was in any way connected to the murders. No one was there after Oscar’s death who didn’t belong there. Somebody would have noticed a strange man lurking around. So you’re the only one who could have hidden the murder weapon in Dean’s place. You implicated him.”
“No!” Joan said, still on her feet. “I like Dean. And you have got to let me go before another man close to me is hurt.”
“Another?” Hannibal’s mouth dropped open when it came to him. He had been so focused on reconstructing events of the past that he forgot about the present. The first killing might have been accidental, and the last may have been to protect old secrets, but the second, Grant Edwards’ murder, had surely been about jealousy. He looked up at Joan to find her again staring past him toward the door. She wanted out, and he suddenly realized why.
“Mark,” was all he had time to say before the impact to his lower back sent him sprawling across the room. His right arm hit the writing table and his left hit the bed, leaving no way to reduce the impact when his face thumped into the floor. Through the haze of semi-consciousness he could hear Joan’s heels clicking out of the room.
32
Hannibal felt the gun being pulled from his left hand and braced for the bullet that did not come. Instead he took one hard kick to his midsection. Hannibal felt he deserved it for unforgivable carelessness. Very slowly he turned onto his right side to scan his surroundings.
The cheap carpeting scraped his face when he landed. His breath rasped in his throat. Pain shot up his spine as he moved, but he faced his situation stoically. His sunglasses had flown from his face so he had a very clear view of Cook, Donner’s blonde haired escort from the German bar. The man looked even taller standing above Hannibal, pointing Hannibal’s own Sig Sauer down at him. He craned his head to find Donner, above and behind him, sitting calmly at the round table, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette.
“Well, this is a spot to be in, eh?” Donner said with a faint smile. His hard blue eyes pushed to a squint. “I am fortunate of course, that Cook returned from his errand when he did. But then, had he found what he was looking for, this would all be over now.”
“I take it Joan’s on her way to warn Mark at last?” Hannibal said. “You should have sent Cook with her. In her ex-husband’s mind, she’s betrayed him. She won’t be able to stop him.”
Donner smiled, his chin pushing down into the rolls of skin and fat below it. “I think her position is stronger than yours. Policemen will soon be here, yes? And they will find an elite soldier, a ranger, and a veteran visiting from Germany who have been attacked in their hotel room.”
“They know your hostage is involved in a murder investigation,” Hannibal said, working to stay calm. “And they know that you, Donner, are a part of that investigation.”
“Will that justify the private detective pulling a gun on us in our own hotel room without any hard evidence that we were involved in any wrongdoing? Even a policeman would not have been able to walk in here uninvited without a warrant and point a loaded gun at me. Tell me, who are they more likely to believe? You or me?”
From the hall a voice said, “Won’t matter what you say.”
Hannibal’s head spun. First his eyes fixed again on his gun. Then he looked past it to Ray standing in the doorway. The gun began to swing away as Cook’s face turned toward Ray. This idiot would kill his friend without a second thought. Hannibal hooked his right foot behind Cook’s. Then with a grunt he stamped out with his left. His heel smacked into the side of Cook’s knee. There was a subtle snapping sound like a small twig stepped on in the woods.
Cook’s mouth dropped open and he made a gasping noise as he went down. Ray hopped forward to stamp down on Cook’s wrist, holding the gun down. He reached down to recover the weapon.
Donner leaped from his chair and swung a booted foot forward. Hannibal’s legs were tangled up with Cook’s, limiting his movement. He barely avoided the main thrust of the kick. The heel grazed his head, but despite the flash of pain, he grasped the heel flying past and pushed hard. Caught off balance, Donner fell backward into the round table. Spurred by his rising anger, Hannibal managed to get to his feet just about when Donner did. The older man cocked back a fist, but then seemed to reconsider.
“Please,” Hannibal said, leaning back against the low chest of drawers. “Please try.”
Donner looked past Hannibal to Ray, who lowered the gun to his side and shrugged his shoulders. Donner looked away, as if he were planning to sit. Then without warning he whipped his fist up, leaning with all his power into a right cross aimed at Hannibal’s jaw.
Hannibal’s left hand slapped the punch inward. Donner may have even seen Hannibal smile as his gloved right fist slammed up and forward into Donner’s midsection. His fist seemed to sink to its wrist in that soft belly, and the air burst out of Donner like the cork from a champagne bottle.
Donner crumpled forward. Hannibal seized his jacket lapels with both hands and swung him around, trying to sit him on the low chest of drawers, but Donner’s knees were rubber bands now and he slumped on to the floor.
In that one brief instant, Hannibal had a gut-wrenching picture of the present superimposed against the past. Just behind and to the right of Donner’s face was his West Point class photo.
Hannibal recognized Donner in his sharp, crisp uniform primarily by his eyes, the same hard deep blue marbles in the live face beside the photo. But the old picture showed a hard body and a Spartan face with deep cleft cheekbones and a dimple in the chin. Nothing like the sagging cheeks and double chin Hannibal faced in present day real life. What a waste, he thought. Then his eyes were drawn to the man standing beside Donner in the photo. Hannibal’s jaw dropped an inch as he matched the photograph to a verbal description he had heard not long ago. This man was taller than Donner, handsome and on the slim side. But beneath that military jacket one could see he was muscular. Dark brown hair and eyes. High cheekbones. Well tanned.
“I’ll be damned,” Hannibal said. “You went to the academy with him, didn’t you?”
Hannibal dropped Donner and grabbed up the photo, searching the lettering beneath the photo for the name.
Seated on the floor, the dazed Donner mumbled, “You won’t stop the General. He’s too much for you, too much for any man.”
“The general?” Hannibal asked. “I get it. The man was your commander I bet, as well as your classmate. But would that cause a man to share his wife and even cover up her murder?” Then Hannibal glanced at those hard blue eyes for a moment, eyes that were beginning to go misty. “Yes, I suppose you would. You’d do anything to protect this man you revered, this general…”
Hannibal hesitated as he searched the names at the bottom of the photo, but when he found Al Brooks he was a short, pale, blond-haired blue eyed man. The photo matching the description of Joan’s husband went with a different name.