Harper Allen - Sullivan's Last Stand

“Hank—missed you at the last two meetings. Call me.”

“Wilkes is a friend from AA,” Sullivan said. “Hank’s mentioned him once or twice.” He frowned. “Those meetings are his lifeline, Bailey. He doesn’t miss them. There’s something wrong here.”

She met his eyes. “I agree, but it’s pretty obvious what it is,” she said, trying not to sound brusque. “He’s fallen off the wagon, Sullivan. Your boy Jackson’s probably out on a bender.”

He turned from her abruptly, his expression unreadable. “I don’t believe that. I’m going in.”

Before she could say another word, he stepped across the threshold, and without even having seen him reach for it, she saw that his gun was in his hand. She looked apprehensively over her shoulder. It was midafternoon, and apart from an old man a few houses down dozing on his porch, the street was deserted. Stifling her annoyance, she slipped quickly in after him and closed the door quietly behind her.

The minuscule front hall opened immediately onto a cramped, untidy kitchen. On the counter an empty bottle lay on its side, and the broken shards of a smashed glass were strewn nearby on the linoleum floor.

“Hell.” In front of her, Sullivan slowly holstered his gun. He turned to her, his mouth tight. “Looks like you were right, doesn’t it? I’ll check the bedroom in case he’s sleeping it off in there.”

Shrugging in resignation, he started to step across the broken glass, but then he stopped, his glance sharpening on the fallen bottle on the counter. He set it upright, turning it so that the label faced them. She looked at him, confused, and saw the broad shoulders stiffen under the impeccably cut jacket.

“Hank’s not a rye drinker. Somebody didn’t do their homework,” he said grimly.

His hand went to his holster again, and all of a sudden the Armani suit might just as well have been fatigues, and the small, untidy kitchen an ominously silent jungle. He hadn’t put his former profession behind him at all, Bailey thought with quick insight. He reacted like a soldier. Just below the casually lazy surface of the man was a tense alertness, and at the first sign of trouble his military instincts took over.

Except she couldn’t see what had aroused his suspicions.

“He’s an alcoholic,” she said dismissively. “If he wanted a drink badly enough he’d break into the cooking sherry.”

“Maybe he would, at that. But he still wouldn’t choose a grain-based alcohol, and if he had, he’d be lying on the floor with that glass, his throat swollen closed,” Sullivan snapped. “He’s even allergic to bread, for God’s sake. This is some kind of setup.”

“A setup for what? To make it look like the man fell off the wagon?” She stared at him in frustration. “For crying out loud, Sully, it doesn’t make sense. For one thing, who knew we were coming here today? Who would have expected you to barge in illegally the way you just did?” A strand of hair had escaped from her clip, and she blew it away from her eyes with an impatient breath. “Let’s check out the rest of the house before we jump to any conclusions. Maybe he’s in the bedroom with an empty bottle of vodka, sleeping it off. Maybe the rye was for a friend.”

Without waiting for him to respond, she pushed past him with more annoyance than the situation warranted. With a muttered oath, he grabbed her arm and stopped her.

“I’m armed. You’re not. I’ll take point position and you bring up the rear,” he said tightly. “In fact, I’d prefer it if you stayed right here.”

“Forget it. I’m a real woman, not one of your bimbos,” she retorted. “If you’re going to lead, lead, but I’m coming with you.”

He wasn’t happy about it, she knew. Too bad, she thought as she shadowed him from room to room, hanging back a little as he cautiously entered each one. She wasn’t happy with the situation, either, but her reasons were harder to figure out. Why did his loyalty to the man who worked for him, however misguided she might see it as, irritate her so? They entered the bathroom, and she was jolted out of her thoughts.

“Wait a minute,” she said as Sullivan turned to leave. “There’s something odd here.”

“What?” He shrugged and looked around. “There’s nothing out of place.”

“That’s just it,” Bailey said slowly. “Hank’s a single guy, and the rest of the house is as untidy as you’d expect it to be. But this bathroom’s immaculate. The taps actually sparkle, for heaven’s sake.”

“And the floor’s been washed.” He looked down, and then over at the towel rack. She followed his glance.

“Not even a facecloth,” she said, frowning. “What does he use to dry himself with?”

“A towel, like everyone else does.” His eyes darkened. “But towels can be used to mop up blood, too.”

She felt an icy chill settle over her as his words sank in, and it was all she could do to stop herself from backing instinctively out of the small room. Had a man been killed here? Had he been killed so violently that his murderer had had to get down on his hands and knees after the deed and scrub every square inch of the floor to remove all traces of his blood? The bath was a combination shower, she noted. There were plastic rings on the rod, but no curtain. Had it been pressed into grisly service as a makeshift shroud by someone desperate to dispose of a body?

She was letting her imagination run away with her, Bailey told herself sharply. What they had here was an empty house, an empty bottle and an empty bathroom. Combined with Jackson’s absence from work and the little she knew about him, her first guess had to be the right one.

But Sullivan wouldn’t accept that. He seemed willing to stand by the missing Jackson no matter what.

And that was what stung, she realized. His loyalty to a man who worked for him was unshakable. His loyalty to her had been limited to three days, at most.

“I’m checking out that last room,” she said shortly, turning from him back into the small hallway. “What is it, some kind of den?”

He was right behind her, but the door was only a few feet away, and before he could stop her she’d opened it and stepped into the room impatiently. That was as far as she got.

Her eyes widened in shock as she surveyed her surroundings, and behind her she heard Sullivan swear under his breath as his arm went around her and he pulled her closer to him.

It had once been an office, but now it was a disaster area. A computer lay smashed on the floor, and a filing cabinet was tipped over on its side, its drawers removed and upside down nearby. Drifts of paper covered every available surface, obviously ripped from the empty file folders that were scattered about. Whoever had done this had been in a murderous rage, Bailey thought shakily. He’d been looking for something, and either he hadn’t found it or the fact that he’d had to search for it in the first place had prompted him to trash everything in sight. She took a hesitant step forward, and then looked down.

She was standing on one of the few file folders that still seemed to contain something. Moving her foot, she bent down and picked it up.

“Plowright,” Sullivan said tersely, reading the typed label out loud. “Angelica’s case. Is his report all there?”

Bailey flipped open the folder and leafed through the neatly numbered pages. “It seems to be,” she said slowly. “Whoever did this, he couldn’t have been searching for Angel’s file. We’d better call the police.”

“Not yet.” He hunkered down, sifting through papers, scanning them quickly and then letting them fall to the floor again. He straightened and looked at her. “They’re what I thought,” he said briefly. “Hank normally wouldn’t keep confidential files here—this is his research for a book he’s writing on famous crimes of the last century. The Plowright file is the only one here that anyone could have been looking for, so why the hell didn’t they take it?”

“Because they didn’t want the report itself,” she said slowly, her mind racing. “They wanted the photos that went with it—the photos of the woman that Aaron was with last weekend. That’s what this is all about, Sullivan. Someone’s trying to conceal her identity, and it looks like they’ll go to any lengths to do so.”

She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “Maybe even murder,” she added shakily, her eyes meeting his.

“Let’s take it from the top again. Why the hell did you and your lady here break into the house anyway?”

They were back at Sullivan Investigations, where Sullivan had told the police they would be when he’d contacted them from the trashed bungalow on his cell phone. Bailey could guess why he hadn’t wanted to hang around waiting for the authorities to show up, and as soon as the two of them returned to the office her guess had been proved right. Giving a quick rundown of the situation to three of his top operatives, he’d grimly instructed them to drop whatever other cases they were on and start looking for their missing comrade.

His haste in getting a search under way was justified. Within minutes of the briefing session, two police detectives had showed up asking for him and Bailey, and it was clear from the attitude of the younger man of the pair that he was prepared to grill them all night if he didn’t get the answers he wanted. So far he’d concentrated his attention on Sullivan, but at this last query Bailey couldn’t keep silent any longer.

“Hold it right there, Detective Straub.” She pushed herself from the edge of the gleamingly polished conference table that she’d been leaning against and took a step nearer the man. He was fair skinned, with sandy hair that was already starting to recede, and at her interruption he turned a blank look upon her, as if he’d forgotten she was in the room. His partner, a man about Sullivan’s age, burly and solid, swiftly hid the flash of amusement that momentarily lightened his somber expression.

“I’m not anyone’s lady, Detective.” She bit the words off curtly. “I run an investigative agency of my own—Triple-A Acme Investigations. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”

“It’s the first one in the phone book,” Sullivan added blandly.

She shot him an annoyed look. “I dropped by this afternoon to discuss an unrelated business matter with Mr. Sullivan. When he learned that one of his employees hadn’t been in to work for a few days and couldn’t be contacted, I suggested we continue our talk on the way to Jackson’s place so he could check the situation out.” She didn’t meet Sullivan’s alert gaze. “Frankly, I think he acted entirely appropriately. Our first thought was that the man had been taken ill and possibly needed assistance. It wasn’t until we saw that his house had obviously been searched that we knew the matter was anything more than just an employee laid low by a flu bug.”

She was lying through her teeth, Bailey thought in faint surprise, and until the words had actually come out of her mouth, she hadn’t known that she had no intention of telling the truth—the whole truth, she fudged weakly to herself. After all, she had come here originally to discuss business with Sullivan, not realizing initially that it would have any connection to the absence from work of one of his operatives.

If it did, she added mentally. Finding her sister’s case file at the man’s house wasn’t proof positive that the two disappearances were linked. It could mean quite the contrary, but that didn’t alter the fact that there was one other detail that she—and Sullivan, too, she now realized—hadn’t bothered to mention to the two detectives. She resisted the impulse to glance guiltily at her oversize shoulder bag, only a few feet away from her on a chair, but when Straub’s partner finally spoke, she wondered at first whether he’d somehow been able to read her mind.