Playing Dead_ A Novel of Suspense - Allison Brennan [27]
He turned the water on cold. Dammit, he didn’t want it to be like this. He didn’t want to have to kill Claire. He wouldn’t. That’s why he hadn’t touched her in fifteen years. He’d had opportunities, but he never touched her inappropriately.
Fifteen years ago fate had stepped in and saved him. He’d never admit that to the blackmailers, but sending him to assassinate Chase Taverton had changed his life for the better.
* * *
He’d followed Chase Taverton three days to get a feel for his routine. Taverton didn’t have one, other than working long hours at the district attorney’s office. He’d considered taking him out that first day, but the blackmailers were concerned about the circumstances of Taverton’s death.
It was Judge Hamilton Drake who had proposed he should frame someone. Drake knew Taverton was having an affair with a married woman. He didn’t know who, but it was a not-so-secret secret in the building.
It didn’t take the assassin long to learn the identity of Taverton’s lover. Taverton went to her house Monday during lunch, stayed just under an hour, then left. He did the same thing on Tuesday. While he was inside fucking the whore, the assassin carefully broke into Taverton’s snazzy BMW and read his schedule for the week. Taverton had “Lunch w/ L” written every day that week. Scanning back, he’d been having the affair for a long, long time. They even had a weekend trip planned in two weeks. The assassin called his blackmailers and suggested they wait until the trip to kill him.
Negative. Taverton had to die as soon as possible. He was working a case that would get the judge and other important people in deep shit.
So the assassin promised he’d be dead Wednesday by one in the afternoon.
Lydia O’Brien was a nurse and she worked the night shift, twelve hours, from six p.m. until six a.m. four days a week. Her husband was a cop and left at seven thirty. The assassin didn’t know about a daughter until he broke into the house while the adulteress slept. That was the curse of rushing the job. He’d have known about the daughter if he’d had more time. He swallowed his nerves. It was as if he’d never killed before. But he’d never killed for reasons that weren’t . . . more personal.
He had his own gun, but he also knew cops. They always kept a gun in their bedroom. He wished he had more time—one day to steal the gun, the next to kill the prosecutor and his whore. But the blackmailers wanted no delays, which meant no more planning time.
If he had to use his own gun, he’d have to leave it, otherwise the frame wouldn’t work. They’d try to trace the gun, but it was old, long ago stolen, and had no murders attached to it. He hoped to get his hands on the cop’s gun.
There was nothing that connected the assassin to the two people he planned to kill. The blackmailers wouldn’t talk, because they had as much—or more—to lose. And he knew enough about why they wanted Taverton dead to keep them uncomfortable. He’d recorded his conversation with Harper and Drake just to be on the safe side. He didn’t want them to think he was expendable.
He was too smart for that.
He didn’t even live in Sacramento, he had no reason to be here, and he was staying under an assumed name in a hotel down in a seedy Stockton neighborhood forty minutes south of the capital city. He could disappear and the police would look for people who wanted Taverton dead. That’s why killing him with the whore made so much sense. The police would look at the obvious: her idiot husband. When the assassin told Harper about his plan to take out both Taverton and his lover, within twelve hours Harper learned that O’Brien worked solo. He was normally a training officer, but had no rookie currently assigned to him.
A lot of things could go wrong. O’Brien could be on a call. Taverton could cancel his rendevous. But the assassin took comfort in the fact that he wasn’t connected to anyone and could slip away. If it all went south and the blackmailers exposed