Midnight Kiss (Men of Midnight #7) - Lisa Marie Rice Page 0,59
what I want. The woman in that picture is Hope Ellis. She was here. I could see you recognized her. I want to know exactly when she was here and what she said and you’d better give it to me straight because otherwise …” He smiled down into those weeping eyes, listening to the man’s terrified wheezing. “You know the rest. Now talk.”
A quarter of an hour later, he walked back out the door.
So — Hope Ellis had been here yesterday. The old man chased her off quickly. She’d been accompanied by a man the geezer described as ‘tall and strong’. Which could mean anything. A boyfriend? But the background info the Senator had provided on Hope Ellis didn’t include a boyfriend, tall and strong or otherwise. So that was an unknown quantity. The boyfriend wasn’t armed or surely he would have pulled it.
The thing was, the geezer recognized her. He didn’t know her as Hope Ellis but as Cathy Benson, a little girl who’d lived with her single mother here in the trailer park maybe twenty-five years ago but had died, together with her mother, in a car accident. The geezer wasn’t absolutely sure when. Wasn’t sure about anything but the fact that she’d died. Still, the little girl had been very pretty and had had dark hair, green eyes and a narrow face just like Hope Ellis. And the photograph was of the woman he’d seen yesterday. He was sure of that.
The geezer had been crying by the time he told it all to Resnick, who’d interrogated hundreds of prisoners. Terror and weeping did not make a man a good source of intel. Sometimes they lied, just to give something up.
If so, tough luck.
When Resnick was absolutely certain the man had given him everything he knew, he pulled the Todd knife and carefully slid it right in between the third and fourth rib, straight into the heart, and watched as the geezer died. It was a quick death, for which the old man should have been grateful. Quick and clean. No bleeding, all the blood stayed inside the chest cavity.
On entering the cabin, Resnick had noticed a nice collection of cheap rotgut whiskey bottles that were mostly empty. One was still three-quarters full, and doubtless would have been just another empty by nightfall. Resnick carefully carried the body to the messy, smelly cot and laid the man down. He poured the contents of the bottle on some dirty blankets he placed over the dead body and lit them up.
He stayed long enough to make sure the fire caught and would burn the hut down completely.
When the fire brigade came, they’d find what was probably a common scene in these difficult times. An old man, living in poverty, who drank too much, setting himself on fire with the cheap cigar Resnick had found and placed on the bed, leaving the box of matches on the floor next to the bed.
The police would come and stay maybe half an hour. Maybe.
Sacramento, like most cities these days, was strapped for cash. Police departments were understaffed and underpaid. They’d take in what had happened in a glance — sad old man getting drunk and smoking in bed. Nothing to see here, folks. Move on.
Autopsies cost around five grand and Medicare didn’t cover it. Resnick was betting the old man had no family to demand and pay for an autopsy. The authorities would find a charred cadaver no one cared about and no one was going to probe around the burned skin for puncture wounds. Burned corpses were disgusting. Resnick had seen a lot of them while operational. They were grotesque and stank. Only the most hardened coroner would want anything to do with a burned body.
Resnick had extracted what he could from the geezer and was good to go.
He’d already muddied his license plates, front and back. He was riding a Suburban, black, like a billion other Suburbans out there. True, a Suburban in a place like this was unusual, but he had an app for that, literally. He pulled up a surveyor’s map of the area and sent up a mini drone, overlapping the drone’s footage with the map on his tablet.
There was another way out that intersected with the highway ten miles up. But it was entirely possible that video cameras along the main highway had caught him driving into the trailer park. But if so, they’d also have caught Hope Ellis and whoever was with her.