Kill Fee (9 page)

S
tevens followed Paige Pyatt back through the house and into a bright sunroom overlooking the lake. He recognized the view from one of Cody’s pictures. It was a beautiful spot, breathtaking. Pyatt pulled out a chair. “Coffee?”

Stevens sat down. “Sure,” he said.

Pyatt walked into the adjacent kitchen and started to fiddle with a coffee machine. She glanced back at Stevens. “Mickey said we should expect you,” she said. “He’s worried about us.”

“Should he be?” Stevens asked her.

“Oh, probably.” Pyatt shrugged. “Anytime you have money, people will want to take it from you. It’s a fact of life, Agent. Cream and sugar?”

“Please. You think Spenser’s murder was related to money?”

“I don’t know what I think,” Pyatt said. She returned to the sunroom with two steaming mugs of coffee. “Certainly, Spenser had enemies.”

“Anyone who stood to gain from his death?”

“All of them,” she said, “in one way or another. If not financially, then in other ways. Spenser was a great man, Agent Stevens. The weak will always try to pull people like him down.”

Stevens took the coffee. Sipped it. “You came back to Fergus Falls,” he said. “I’d heard you lived in Minneapolis now.”

Pyatt nodded. “We did,” she said. “We do. It’s just Mickey panicked. He thinks the family’s a target.”

“Elias Cody was murdered. Monday afternoon.”

Pyatt’s face clouded. She stared into her coffee. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I know.”

“He seemed to have a bit of a fixation on you.”

“Fixation.” Pyatt paused. “An understatement, maybe.”

“Yeah?”

Pyatt didn’t answer for a long moment. Didn’t look up. Then she stood, slowly. “It’s easier if I show you,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She walked out of the sunroom and disappeared into the house. When she returned a few minutes later, she was carrying a stack of papers.

“Spenser didn’t know I kept these,” she said. “Though I don’t know why I did.” She set them down before Stevens. Letters, he saw, all of them. Faded envelopes. Faded handwriting. All addressed to Paige Sinisalo. “My maiden name,” Pyatt told him. “Eli never quite accepted that I’d married Spenser.”

“All this time.”

Pyatt nodded. “He wrote passionately. Certainly with more fire than I ever saw in his person. He was a slight man. Shy, unbecoming. But in his letters . . .”

Stevens examined an envelope. Peered inside. “He was in love with you.”

“Madly,” she said. “He never forgave Spenser.”

“For marrying you?”

“For stealing me.” Pyatt looked at Stevens. “Eli always believed I was his by right. He’d known me first, you see, and he already saw Spenser as a rival, a threat. He hated his cousin for taking me from him.”

Something in her tone triggered an alarm in Stevens’s mind. “
Hate
is a strong word,” he said.

Pyatt nodded. “It’s the right word, Agent Stevens. Eli blamed Spenser for all of his life’s misfortunes, and he never let go of that blame. You must have seen his house. He withered away.”

“Were you in contact with him?” Stevens gestured to the letters. “Did you keep writing?”

Pyatt shook her head. “Spenser found out. He forbade me. Of course, I could see his point. I was a married woman.”

“How long ago did you stop?”

“About twenty years ago, I’d say.” She looked away, out over the lake. “I didn’t even love Eli. I suppose I just enjoyed the attention.”

Stevens watched her. She was somewhere else, somewhere in the past, and he let her stay there for a few minutes. Then he cleared his throat. “Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to kill Eli?”

Paige Pyatt shook her head sadly. “I can’t think of many people who knew he was alive.”

T
he kill was set.

Parkerson checked the database on Wednesday afternoon. Found a message from the client. “Funds delivered,” it read. “Final half on completion.”

Parkerson checked the Killswitch account and verified the payment: A hundred-thousand-dollar transfer had completed three hours earlier. Parkerson stared at the account balance, savored the moment. Then he logged out of the database and the account. Squared up to his computer. He had work to do.

The client had forwarded a profile of the target, including a schedule of the target’s probable movements and a list of suggested kill spots. Parkerson had printed it when Jamie was at lunch. Now he examined it, scanning each page, and beginning to formulate a plan.

THE PLANNING WAS THE FUN PART.
The checklist. A weapon. A rental car and a hotel room. A bank account number. All of the logistics, the cogs in the machine. Parkerson relished the cleanliness of the operation, the fulfillment of a hundred distinct tasks that would, when completed, result in some poor bastard’s demise.

It wasn’t the killing itself that interested Parkerson. In fact, the messiness of murder fairly sickened him: the blood and bile, the shit and piss and decay, the abject and utter
filthiness
of death—it was enough to turn a man’s stomach. No, what fascinated Parkerson was the machine itself. The money came in. The cars were rented. The weapons procured. The assets mobilized and the targets destroyed. Clean and automatic. An ultramodern mechanism for destruction.

He’d spent hours in his room as a boy, dismantling things. Radios. Toaster ovens. TV sets. Anything he could scrounge up. He’d grown up alone, the product of parents who fought from the day he was born to the day his mother walked out. His father, a mechanic, had encouraged his son’s curiosity. Parkerson had been a quiet child, not athletic, uninterested in girls. Machines were about the only interest he had in common with his father.

Later, Parkerson discovered computers. He was instantly enthralled. Where cars and appliances needed grease, and oil, and were prone to
mechanical failure, computers were clean and sterile. Fast. Predictable. Reliable. In computers, Parkerson found the perfection that humanity sorely lacked.

He studied computers, obsessed over them. Devoted his life to working with them. Found a career that rewarded his diligence, an industry that welcomed his particular collection of interests. He’d worked hard and been compensated well. Had built a life for himself that outwardly appeared normal. A family. Friends. A nice house, a wife.

Inside, though, Parkerson knew it was all just a part of the game. A man needed to do certain things to succeed in the world. He needed a family. He needed to dress well, and tell jokes, and flirt with his secretary. Attributes. Objectives. Life was simple when reduced to its component parts.

Parkerson had played the game for years. He’d advanced through the company. Made friends. Earned respect. Inside, though, he was stultified. He’d won the game.

Then Killswitch came along. A new game to play: more challenges, higher stakes. The work was fulfilling, the rewards exhilarating. These days, Parkerson hardly ever got bored.

P
arkerson booked a return airline ticket to Miami in Richard O’Brien’s name, a nice hotel on the beach. And a rental car—Liberty.

He’d discovered the weakness in Liberty’s reservation software a few weeks after he’d launched the Killswitch database. Rather, an enterprising young hacker had discovered the loophole. That hacker was now dead, and any remnants of his work rested solely with Parkerson, who’d
worked hard to scrub the young anarchist’s boasts from the litany of Internet forums he’d frequented. Now, as far as Parkerson knew, the Liberty loophole was secret once more, safe from mischievous teenagers—and from the Liberty IT geeks themselves.

It was a simple play, really. Parkerson had taught himself over the course of a weekend. Log in to the reservation software, and with a couple keystrokes, swap out the asset’s name for that of another customer. Sometimes Parkerson used Liberty clients. Sometimes he just used names pruned from FAA passenger manifests—another anonymous hacker’s contribution to Killswitch.

Parkerson had hoped that his computer chicanery would remain an unnecessary precaution, but, judging from the response to the Minnesota job, he’d been smart to implement the protocol when he did. The asset had been careless; the FBI had tailed him and copied down his plates. Now some poor Iowa manure salesman was in federal custody, while the asset skated free with no worries.

Parkerson scouted the client’s proposed kill spots and settled on a suitable locale. Then he printed a briefing for the asset and reminded himself to overnight a weapon to the asset’s hotel in the morning.

As with the rental cars, Parkerson found the Internet made securing guns for his assets a simple procedure. Any sucker with a counterfeit ID could fake a purchase permit, and online retailers would happily ship as much ammunition as an army of assets could use. A weapon’s serial numbers could be filed, rendering the gun untraceable, and there were plenty of second-tier courier services willing to ship packages across the country quick and cheap, no questions asked. Running a contract killing operation, Parkerson had found, was almost shockingly easy.

Parkerson reviewed his plans for inconsistencies. For needless risk. Found nothing unsatisfactory, and shut down his computer, stood, and pulled on his coat. Locked up the office and went home for the night.

W
indermere played a hunch and let Alex Kent walk. “Had to do it,” she told Davis. “We don’t have enough to hold him, anyway.”

“Accessory to murder?” said Davis. “He rented a car for a killer.”

Windermere shook her head. “Identity theft. Kent doesn’t know a damn thing about any murders.”

“Your case,” Davis said, shrugging. “Hope it doesn’t come back to bite you.”

Me, too,
Windermere thought. “Don’t make me an asshole,” she told Kent as she dropped him outside his house. “Stick around. We might need to bring you back in for more questioning. Got it?”

The guy practically tore the door off the car. “Thank you,” he told Windermere, scrambling out to the sidewalk. “No problem. Thank you.”

To his credit, Davis didn’t suggest any more tours of Chicago—or anything else, for that matter. He drove Windermere and Mathers back to O’Hare in silence, and it was only as he dropped them at the United terminal that he spoke.

“You’re making a mistake,” he said. “That guy was a suspect. You should have charged him with something and let him stew on it.”

“He’s a history teacher, Davis,” said Windermere. “Anyway, soon as he called a lawyer he’d have been gone. There’s something else going on here. Something bigger than Kent.”

Davis shook his head. “Good to see you again, Agent. Next time maybe we’ll actually
do
something.”

“Look forward to it.” Windermere slammed the door closed. Mathers climbed out to the sidewalk beside her.

“So what happens next, Supercop?” he asked her.

Windermere watched Davis’s big SUV pull away from the curb. “The hell if I know,” she said, sighing. “I guess we go home.”

IT WAS LONG AFTER DARK
by the time the agents’ flight landed at Minneapolis–Saint Paul. Windermere followed Mathers off the small plane, and they walked together out to the parking garage. Windermere’s car was closer, her daddy’s prize Chevelle, and Mathers lingered beside it as she unlocked the door. “Grab a bite somewhere?”

Windermere stiffened. She looked back at Mathers, who watched her, a grin on his face. She felt something inside her like panic. “What’d you say?”

The junior agent shrugged. “Just asked if you were hungry,” he said. “We could get eats. Talk this thing over.”

Windermere stared at him over the car. He was cute, definitely. Tall and slender and handsome, and there was a pleasing hint of muscle beneath his baby blue shirt. It had been more than two years since Mark had walked out, and Windermere had caught herself eyeing Mathers across the office a couple of times. She wasn’t averse to the idea. Still, something made her hesitate, and she was pretty sure she knew what it was.

Stevens.
She didn’t even
like
Stevens that way—she’d better not, anyway, not with Nancy around—but they’d always had chemistry. Never acted on it, either of them, but it still somehow felt weird to Windermere, picking up with somebody new. Another cop, especially, after all the bullshit she and Stevens had been through.

It felt, she realized, a little bit like cheating.

Absurd. Still, she shook her head. Gave Mathers an apologetic smile. “I’m pretty beat, partner,” she said. “I’d better just go home.”

Mathers’s smile didn’t waver. “No problem,” he said. “Guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He shot her a wave and ambled off across the parking garage.
Windermere watched him go, and when he was gone, she opened the Chevelle’s door and slid in behind the wheel. She sighed and sat there, unmoving, for a minute or two, examining her reflection in the mirror.
What’s wrong with you?
she thought.
The kid’s harmless. It’s just dinner.

She let the question hang there for a moment. Then she started the engine.
Nothing’s wrong. You’re just tired.
She backed out of the parking stall and peeled out of the garage.