Afraid of the Dark - James Grippando [113]
“I agreed to keep the police out of this until Vince and I were able to talk to you. Now I’m hearing that the man who beat you up may also have killed your daughter, but clearly you’re not telling me everything. So I’m calling the police.”
She grabbed his phone. “I’m not ready to go to the police.”
“You mean Chuck’s not ready to go to the police.”
Her mouth fell open, and the reaction confirmed Jack’s suspicion: Coordination of some sort was stretching across the ocean. “What kind of weird thing do you and Chuck have going on?”
Again, she had no answer. Jack snatched his phone back from her. Lawyer’s instinct told him to make the phone call and turn this over to the police—to let Scotland Yard find McKenna’s killer, perhaps Neil’s killer, too. But tonight might be his only chance to find out what Shada knew. Neil would have run with an opportunity like this—and that was a good enough barometer for Jack.
“He’s tracking me, isn’t he? Chuck has GPS spyware tied to my cell phone, and that’s how you found me on the street.”
“Well . . . that may be.”
“I’m giving you five minutes to make sense of this,” said Jack.
“I hardly know where to start.”
“Start by telling me why you think this man may be your daughter’s killer.”
“Habib told me he was there—in the house—when she was killed.”
“He told you that today?”
“No. We talked the day after McKenna died. That was when he told me.”
Jack paused, not comprehending, not sure what to ask next. One question loomed largest. “How in the world could you run off to London with the man who murdered your daughter?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “In fact, a big part of the reason I left Chuck—left the country—was to get away from the reminders of what had happened to McKenna. I didn’t think I was running off with her killer. I was sure Jamal did it.”
“Because McKenna named him?”
“Not just that. Habib told me what happened.”
“His version of what happened, you mean. What was his story?”
She winced with pain, not from his question but from the bruises. Jack slid out of the booth, quickly got some ice from the bartender, and wrapped it in a napkin for her. She pressed it to her face as she spoke.
“That day McKenna died, Chuck was out of the country. Habib came over to see me. I wasn’t there, but as he was walking back to his car, he heard a scream from inside the house. He knew where we hid the house key—under the pot on the porch—and when he opened the door he saw Jamal running down the stairs. Habib chased him through the kitchen and into the garage, and Jamal hit him over the head with a rake or something. Habib came to after a few minutes and heard another noise. He tried to get up but was so shaky he knocked over the garbage can. Next thing he knew, the door flew open and Vince Paulo shot at him. The bullet hit the propane tank on our barbecue. You know the rest.”
It was barely plausible, and Jack called it what it was. “Everything he told you is a crock. Jamal wasn’t even in the country when McKenna was killed.”
“I didn’t know that at the time. I kept getting threatening e-mails from Jamal all the way up until Habib and I came up with our plan—until I became Maysoon and went to live with him here in London.”
“Jamal was in Gitmo when you were getting those messages.”
“How was I supposed to know that? I wanted to believe what Habib was telling me. It wasn’t Chuck’s fault—the way he took McKenna’s death so hard and blamed himself for being out of the country. But honestly, if I had stayed around Chuck another day, I probably would have ended up committing suicide for real. I thought I could start over with Habib. I thought I knew him.” She moved the ice to the darkening bruise on her cheekbone. “Until today.”
“You need to tell me how it got to this point.”
“I told you: This is the first I’ve seen this side of him.”
“Really?”
“Do you think I would have given up my life in Miami and moved to London for this?”
“Do you think I came all the way from Miami to get half the story? Talk to me, Shada. Now.”
She looked away, ashamed, then spoke in a soft voice of resignation.