the first sirens’ whoops and wails like trumpeters announcing his achievement. He’d wanted to stop in his tracks and take a bow.
Wanting to be near the crime scene as the curious began converging, he’d picked up his pace, but not enough to be noticed. A reasonably sized crowd had already collected and continued to grow. He’d meandered among families, teenagers groping each other, packs of rambunctious young men, all bunching together, ebbing toward the concentration of police activity.
Jasper hadn’t cared to see the body. He’d seen it. He’d been on the lookout for Drex Easton.
He would come, just as he had to the beach. Of that Jasper had had no doubt. Easton would want either to confirm or rule out that this slaying was the handiwork of Jasper Ford. And Jasper had wanted him to know that it absolutely was.
Take that, Easton.
He’d wondered at what point Easton had initiated his chase? Jasper had been intuiting him for years, but he couldn’t pinpoint the time he had first sensed him. The knowledge that he had a pursuer hadn’t come to him in a jolt of awareness. It had been a seepage into his subconscious. When had it started? After Pixie? Before Loretta? Did Easton know of all his aliases, he wondered, going back all the way to Weston Graham?
How could he? Weston had existed thirty years ago. Easton would have been a boy.
He’d been speculating on how he had come to be the lodestar of Easton’s vocation when he did a double take on a man in the crowd. He was as colorless as a person could possibly be, but Jasper had recognized him instantly as Easton’s sidekick who’d been with him on the pier above the beach.
The man had been observing the scene and looking into each individual face with the same studied casualness that Jasper boasted himself capable of doing. In an instant he had realized that the man was looking for him. But for Jasper Ford, not his newly assumed identity.
Jasper had really wanted to find Easton. Find him, find Talia.
But this opportunity had been too fortuitous to pass up. The gift horse, so to speak.
Jasper had kept the man in sight and carefully stayed out of his. He’d bided his time, allowing the crowd to thicken until it had become difficult to wade through the newcomers asking what had happened and craning their necks in order to see.
Eventually he had worked his way around until he was walking directly toward the man. There was a cluster of people within touching distance of them, but no one noticed when Jasper socked the man hard.
Easton’s pal went down without a sound. With all the jostling going on around them, no one noticed his collapse for a few precious moments, long enough for Jasper to put some distance between them. He kept moving, sometimes swimming upstream, sometimes being propelled by those around him.
But soon he heard the exclamations behind him, had felt the disturbance rippling outward from the spot where the man had dropped. Like everyone else, Jasper halted, turned to look back to see what this new source of commotion was.
His jab had been hard enough and so well placed that it would have incapacitated Easton’s buddy. To what extent didn’t matter much. Easton would get the message.
As he’d left the vicinity, he’d felt a groundswell of satisfaction inside his chest. It had been a productive night. Much more so than he’d counted on. He’d wished to mark his success, make it an occasion. But he’d foregone a celebration. He was bold, not reckless.
So he’d prudently returned to his car, added his newest trophy to the velvet bag, and zipped it back into an inside pocket of his tracksuit.
Driving away, he’d passed ambulances racing toward the scene of yet another emergency, a scene of havoc, another of his masterpieces.
He’d cruised through the city, in no particular hurry, on the hunt for new lodging.
Chapter 32
Drex took a roundabout route from the hospital. After twenty minutes of aimless driving and doubling back several times, he was convinced that they weren’t being followed.
He considered switching hotels, but that would involve a check-in process he would rather avoid. He returned them to the suite they’d occupied that afternoon and, once inside, plopped into a chair and sent Mike a text. Seconds later, his phone rang, surprising him.
“I expected something more covert than a call.”
“I’m all by my lonesome.”
“Rudkowski?”
“Went apeshit when he learned that you two had ducked out. He threatened to arrest me.