20th Victim (Women's Murder Club #20) - James Patterson Page 0,29

you meant.”

He sipped his wine and watched his friend’s face cloud over with sadness.

Dave said, “Damn Murray to hell for what he did …”

Was blaming Murray a reaction to grief? Or was Dave right?

Joe said, “I don’t have a badge, Dave. I’m a freelance consultant. I’ll try to talk to Murray, but if he refuses, I can’t force him to talk. That said, I should be able to poke around enough to see if there’s reason to bring in law enforcement.”

“I can pay you to be my consultant.”

“Shut up, Dave. On second thought, pay me a dollar. Then we’re official.”

Dave thanked him, dug a single out of his shirt pocket, and slid it over to Joe. Joe made a note on the back of his checkbook, “Hired as consultant to D. Channing,” then added the date and his signature. He passed the ad hoc document over to Dave, and Dave signed it, too.

Then he put his hands over his eyes and cried.

Joe tried to comfort him, but he was worried. Although he had accepted without question that Dave loved his father, he couldn’t ignore the nagging feeling that had come up almost a week ago when he had gone with Dave to the hospital to see Ray.

Ray had treated Dave like a kid or like an employee, sending him to the cafeteria, ordering him around.

“You told me that you were very close,” Joe said to Ray, carefully steering his friend back to the present. “So what happens to you now?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I’ll sell the place. Move to LA or New York. I’ve been here for so long, mainly to help out my parents. Mom was a buffer between me and Ray.”

“More about that,” Joe said.

“Well, he was bitter at how things turned out. How I turned out. He made unnecessary cracks. Like, ‘Why don’t you run to the store, Dave?’ If he was drinking, he’d tell me that this was God’s punishment for getting Rebecca killed.”

“Oh, Christ, Dave.”

“I’ve forgiven him. I understand his disappointment. I felt the same way about what I did, a line of thought that dead-ends on that damned highway. But, as you know, my dad took care of me, gave me a job … responsibilities. And before I do another thing with my life, I have to get to the truth about why Ray died. I have to square things. If Dr. Murray is killing people, he has to be stopped. He has to pay.”

Joe said, “I want to see Ray’s medical records, the name of the medical examiner, and Ray’s death certificate.”

“I’ve scanned all of that to my laptop. I’ll get it.”

While Dave went for his laptop, Joe used the bathroom. As he ran the water in the sink, he opened the medicine cabinet. Dave had shelves of medications: antidepressants, drugs for pain and sleep. Joe pointed his phone at all of the little bottles and snapped photos. He had an unwelcome suspicion and he had to allow it.

Like himself, Dave was closing in on fifty. Had he tired of being Ray’s disappointing, damaged child? Had he come up with a plan to get away from his father—for good?

CHAPTER 40

THERE WAS AN empty corner office at the end of the fourth-floor corridor that had once belonged to a crooked cop who didn’t need it anymore or ever again.

I told Brady my plan to turn that office into a war room for the Baron case, and he said, “Be my guest.” Then I told him I was going to form a task force with the primaries on the sniper shootings in other cities.

Brady said, “You’re about to learn what it means to herd cats.”

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a hell yes,” he said.

He took the elevator up to Jacobi’s former office on five and didn’t look back. A half hour later Rich and I had taped up photos of the deceased on the war room walls, our computers had been moved to our new office, and we each had a mug and a thermos full of coffee.

We arranged for a conference call with Detective Richards from Chicago, Detective Noble in LA, Chi and McNeil from out on the street, and Conklin and myself on whatever lines we could grab at that hour, all of us telephonically together at noon.

Richards’s victim was the small smoke shop owner, Albert Roccio. Richards had been miserly with whatever he had gleaned about the shooting, telling us that so far he hadn’t made any progress. Noble had taken the