Run for Your Life - James Patterson [60]
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he said solemnly.
He looked at the face one last time, the sad blue eyes, the half frown on the rigid mouth. Sobbing quietly, he backed to the apartment’s front door, sloshing a generous gasoline trail across the hardwood floor behind him.
The Zippo he took from his pocket had a marine insignia on it. He wiped his cheeks with a deep breath and placed the cool brass of the lighter to his forehead for a moment. Had he forgotten something?
He booted the empty gas can back toward the dining room, thumbed back the lighter’s starter, and tossed it with a deft casualness, a winning card onto a gigantic pot.
Not a thing, he thought.
The loud basslike whump blew his hair back as a ball of flame shot back into the apartment like a meteor. The dining room went up like a pack of matches.
For another few seconds, he stared, mesmerized, at the ink-black smoke freight-training from the doorway.
Then he closed the door, took out his keys, and locked up tight.
Chapter 63
THE DOORMAN OF 1117 FIFTH AVENUE wore a suit and hat that were the same exact hunter green as the awning.
“Can I help you, sir?” he asked as I walked into the lobby.
“Detective Bennett,” I said, showing him my badge. “I need to see Mr. or Mrs. Blanchette.”
Erica Gladstone, the murdered wife in the Locust Valley mansion, had turned out to be one of the Blanchettes. Her father, Henry, ran Blanchette Holdings, the private equity and takeover firm that made companies, and even hedge funds, tremble.
I was there to notify them of Erica’s death, and maybe pick up a lead on their berserk son-in-law.
The elevator up to their penthouse apartment had fine wood paneling and a crystal chandelier. An actual butler in a morning coat opened the front door. Behind a wall of French doors to his right, steam rose from a rooftop swimming pool—an Olympic-sized, infinite-horizon number that seemed to meld into the unspoiled, twenty-story vista of Central Park trees that lay beyond.
“Mr. and Mrs. Blanchette will be downstairs in a moment, Detective,” the sleek butler said with an English accent. “If you would follow me to the living room.”
I stepped into a silk-wallpapered chamber the size of an airplane hangar. A gallery’s worth of professionally lit paintings hung from the double-height walls above designer furniture and sculptures. I gaped at a Pollock the size of a putting green, then exchanged eye contact with a massive stone Chinese dragon that could not, no way, have fit into the elevator.
The duplex would have been the slickest, most opulent, luxury apartment I’d ever laid eyes on without the pool. And I read Architectural Digest. Well, at least every time I went to Barnes and Noble.
“Yes? Detective Bennett, is it? Henry Blanchette. How can I help you?” The speaker was a short, amiable man in running shorts and a sweat-soaked New York Road Runners T, coming through a door. I was happily surprised that he seemed more like a kindly accountant than the Gordon Gekko type I’d been prepared for.
“What’s this about?” an attractive, fiftyish platinum blond woman demanded sharply, stalking into the room behind him. She wore a makeup bib over a melon-colored silk dressing robe. Both Mrs. Blanchette’s appearance and her attitude were more like what I was expecting.
I inhaled deeply, bracing myself. There’s no easy way to tell someone that their child is dead.
“There was a shooting,” I said. “Your daughter, Erica, was killed. She died instantly. I’m terribly sorry.”
Henry’s mouth and eyes seemed to triple in size. He stared at me, confused, as he stumbled back against the edge of a mod-looking mohair club chair. His wife sank, dumbfounded, onto an antique chaise.
“What about the girls?” Henry said softly. “I haven’t seen them in years. They must be grown now. Do they know?”
“Jessica and Rebecca were murdered, too,” I had to tell him. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
His wife gasped, her eyes filling with tears. Henry brought his hand up as if to say something,