Born to Die - Lisa Jackson [61]
His sister, of course, had seen the exchange, and her lips had pursed in abject disapproval.
All of his family had speculated about his love life, and he’d given them just enough information to keep them satisfied, but it was a game, really, watching them offer help to set him up with different women.
As if he needed their charity.
This year the banter had started when his sister announced that her best friend was going through a messy divorce. The woman’s attributes were pretty, good figure, decent job, no kids. Might even end up with several hundred thou, if her husband, the snake, didn’t screw her over.
Then there was one of his brothers’ old high-school girlfriends, rumored to be back in town and newly single. His mother had made note. However, his father had pointed out, the woman they were all so sure was “the one” did have three girls, the oldest already in her teens.
But what about that woman he used to work with, oh, what’s-her-name? You know the one. A lawyer, wasn’t she? And good-looking, too. Smart as a whip.
Such a shame his job took him so far away so often.
He needed to settle down, his father reminded him. Was the old man afraid? Did he suspect?
Maybe next year his schedule would slow down, and he could spend more time here....
He let the conversation swirl around him, smiling affably, talking about the upcoming holidays and how they would all spend Christmas together, though it was getting more and more difficult.
His sister pulled him aside when he helped clear the plates, and she worried aloud about their father’s health. Who knew if the old man would make it to next Thanksgiving? Every day he was still alive and ambulatory was a blessing, didn’t he know?
Next year, well, she couldn’t think that far ahead.
Of course not. Who knew what new construction project would come between then and now?
But five to one the old man, hearty and hale, would outlive all his progeny. And that was saying something.
He stayed to watch his father finish a last scotch, then load himself and his wife into their waiting SUV, a Cadillac complete with driver. He shook his father’s hand and found the old man’s handshake as firm as ever.
“Say something to Mother,” his sister insisted, and lying through his teeth, he told the old bat that she looked “radiant,” and that he couldn’t wait until they all got together again at Christmas.
The second they were driving away, through a falling screen of snow, his thoughts turned toward the future. He managed a round of quick good-byes, and then, saying he had to get home because he had an early flight in the morning, he half jogged to his car.
Only when the rambling lake house disappeared from his rearview mirror did he let down his mask and unhinge his jaw from the insipid smile he’d pinned there for the past five hours. He rubbed at the scar hidden beneath his sideburn and let his thoughts darken.
He didn’t have time for holidays or nonsense.
The radio was playing some insipid Christmas carol, and he snapped it off, his eyes trained on the road ahead and the twin beams of his headlights cutting through the storm. The miles rolled too slowly under his tires.
He couldn’t waste any time.
He had too much to do.
The ingrates that were his family just didn’t know it. Couldn’t. Not ever.
CHAPTER 13
“ So that’s it,” Alvarez said as she and Slatkin and an assistant, Ashley Tang, packed up the contents from Jocelyn Wallis’s apartment and carried the bags to the waiting van from the state crime lab. The evidence had been photographed, bagged and tagged, then initialed before they hauled the bags along the path broken in the snow to the crime lab van.
Mikhail Slatkin, not yet thirty, was tall and rawboned, with a keen intelligence and guarded demeanor, and was physically the diametric opposite of the woman who worked with him. Petite and Asian, Tang was a woman who, Alvarez guessed, barely tipped the scales at a hundred pounds even in boots and insulated ski