Again the man’s mouth moved. “So beautiful.”
“What was beautiful? Who was beautiful, Peter?”
“Partner…She was beautiful. I told her I was sorry.”
“I know you’re sorry, Peter. Help me catch her killer…yours.”
“Cops!” the dying man shouted suddenly.
“Peter, give me a name! Other people could die,” Jake said, his voice grating with desperation.
“Jake…your partner…sorry…sorry…didn’t want…God forgive me…”
“He’s just ranting,” Dr. Matthews said quietly.
“He said he’d have me killed…proved it…dead man…dead man…”
Bordon’s lips kept moving. No sound was coming. Then, “Jake…” Barely a breath.
Jake’s ear was nearly against the man’s mouth as Bordon’s lips kept moving. Then went still.
A moment later, Dr. Matthews came over and examined the man. He closed Bordon’s eyes.
“He’s…”
“Gone,” Matthews announced. “I’m sorry, Detective Dilessio. You’ll get nothing more from him. He’s beyond human judgment and pain. He’s dead.”
CHAPTER 22
Just after opening, Katie called out to Nick that Sharon was on the phone.
He excused himself to the customers he’d been serving and picked up the receiver.
“Nick,” Sharon said softly.
“Hi, baby, what’s going on?”
“I…need you to come and meet me.”
“Sharon, we’ve just opened. It’s Saturday afternoon.”
“Please.”
“What’s the matter? Is something wrong? Can you tell me?”
“Not—not on the phone.”
She’d been acting so strangely lately. More strangely than ever now, it seemed. He looked around the place. Already jumping, and they’d barely opened the doors. Katie was there, though, and a full staff. Ashley was still sleeping, but if Katie got desperate, she could wake her.
“Nick, I—I need you. I’m afraid. I’m afraid to even talk to you once I see you in person. But I have to. I have to get this out…now. Today. Whatever comes after.”
“All right, all right…of course, if you need me, I’ll be right there. I need an address.”
She gave it to him.
“What kind of a place am I looking for?”
“You’ll know when you get here,” she told him.
“You’re crazy, absolutely crazy,” Mary told John Mast. “The hospital’s too busy. There must be hundreds of visitors.”
“We need those hundreds of visitors.”
He adjusted the surgical mask he had just stolen from the supply room. He studied Mary, who was stuffing a strand of her hair under her cap. Good. No one could see anything but her eyes. Pretty, pale blue eyes. Nondescript, along with the scrubs she was wearing.
No one would recognize him either, because only his eyes were visible. He had donned contacts. He was pretty good with makeup. Shaggy, graying white brows, easily attached. He’d checked his reflection, and he’d done a good job. He’d be judged as a man of at least fifty by any witnesses.
“You’re crazy,” she repeated.
“I’m not crazy. Just desperate,” he said. “Well…it’s almost showtime.”
Jake was on the road home by two.
Exhausted, he forced himself to stop for coffee at the hundred-mile mark. What little he had gleaned from Bordon whirled through his mind. His list of “facts” waltzed before his eyes, along with a number of weekend vacationers and huge semis.
At the turnpike rest stop, he grabbed a sandwich and more coffee, then headed back to his car, eager to reach home. He had a strange feeling that he couldn’t get there fast enough. Like an itch, an intuition that gnawed at him physically.
As he walked across the lot to his car, there was a dull pain in his heart, as well. Bordon hadn’t given him any names, but he had admitted his own complicity, though he’d denied the physical act of murder himself. Not a surprise. But where Jake had once believed Bordon had been issuing the directives, he now knew that hadn’t been true at all.
Bordon had been murdered. It might take the prison officials some time, but they would find out just who had started the brawl that had killed him. Jake couldn’t wait for that news, though, so…
Fact: Peter Bordon had been with Nancy Lassiter. He must have been the man with whom she’d had consensual sex the night she had died. She’d been on to something and willing to bend the rules to get to the truth. She’d been a good cop. His heart ached to think of the moral dilemmas she must have faced as the night progressed.
And all the while, she’d had no idea she was going to die.
As he sat down, he noticed the pad on the passenger seat. He set his coffee in the cup holder and picked up the notebook. He flipped the pages. His own notes. The picture of the scene of the accident that had convinced him the cases were related. He frowned, realizing that two pages were stuck together.
He forced them apart, and his heart skipped a beat.