First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [106]
Stanz snorts. "So what? Most everybody has a safety deposit box."
Jack slides a photocopy of another document from under the paperwork. "Not when two million dollars of Luis Arroyo Ochoa's money goes from the box to this offshore account in the Caymans."
Stanz goes white. He grips the display case so as not to lose his balance. "But this is impossible! Those accounts are sealed."
Jack nods. "So I understand, but that tax lawyer you went to who set up the account? He works for Gus."
Stanz wipes his sweating face. He moves to gather in the damning evidence against him, but Jack is quicker. He spirits the folder away.
"There's a price for everything," he says.
Shooting him a bleak stare, Stanz says, "What's yours?"
"I want to know who murdered Gus."
Stanz breathes a sigh of relief, and Jack knows why. He was terrified that Jack would demand half of the two million he stole. But Jack wants no part of Ochoa's blood money, and he's quite certain neither would Reverend Taske. Besides, Gus provided generously for Renaissance Mission Church in his will, just as he provided for Jack.
The detective licks his lips. "What about the other one?"
"The receipt for the gun you used to kill Manny Echebarra is safe with me, Detective Stanz. No one needs to see it."
Stanz ponders the unexpected situation he finds himself in. At length, he nods. "As it happens, I can help."
He holds out his hand. Jack gives him the folder and he stashes it away.
"The knife we took out of Gus's back is so unusual, it took the ME two weeks to track it down," Stanz says. "It's called a paletta. It's used in bakeries. Gus introduce you to any bakery-store owners? Yeah, I thought so. His calling card, right?" His glittery eyes regard Jack without even the smallest measure of sympathy. This is a business transaction, pure and simple. "The thing of it is, there's no prints, so we can't prove anything. The Metro Police's hands're tied, know what I mean?"
Jack, his mind already fixed on Cyril Tolkan, knows precisely what he means.
THIRTY - SIX
UNLIKE OTHER places in his past Jack had visited recently, the Marmoset's house looked just as he remembered it, with its deep-blue exterior and white shutters. It must have been repainted recently, he thought.
With the real possibility of a kidnap victim inside, along with her abductor, Jack wasn't prepared to take any chances of some overeager idiot tipping Kray/Whitman off. He got no argument from Nina. What he didn't tell her was that, incredible as it seemed, he was now quite certain that Kray/Whitman was the same person who had killed the two nameless men at McMillan Reservoir, the Marmoset, and Gus twenty-five years ago. He was also the man who had abducted Alli Carter, and Jack had little doubt that he would slip his paletta into Alli Carter's back if he was given the slightest hint his lair had been compromised. What he couldn't work out as yet was the overarching pattern into which all these terrible offenses fit, because there was absolutely no doubt in his mind that all the crimes were somehow connected. He was drawing close, however, because he could sense its color in his mind: a cold, neon blue, as beautiful as the developing pattern was ugly.
There was something else the developing pattern told him: In gunning down Cyril Tolkan for Gus's murder, he'd gone after the wrong man. Now, as his mind rolled all the emerging facts around, he had to wonder whether his stalking Tolkan was a case of deliberate misdirection. After all, it was the unique murder weapon that both Stanz and Jack had found most incriminating. The paletta was used in bakeries; Cyril Tolkan owned one: the All Around Town bakery. But though Jack had killed Tolkan twenty-five years ago, the strange filed-down paletta was being used again as a murder weapon. Jack didn't believe the paletta turning up again was a coincidence, nor did he think it was a copycat killer, simply because twenty-five years ago the murder weapon had never been revealed to