Twice Dead - Catherine Coulter [87]
“You’re sure it’s Krimakov.”
He smiled then. “Oh yes, I’m very sure, particularly after what he told you.”
“‘Say hello to your daddy.’”
“Yes. No one else would know that.”
“My mom wore a ring like yours. When she died—” She couldn’t speak, the tears clogged her throat, burned her eyes. He said nothing at all, held her hand, squeezed it a bit more tightly. She swallowed, looked away from him toward the window. It was black out there, no sign of stars from her vantage point. “—I wanted desperately to have something to connect me to her and I almost took that ring, but then I remembered how much she loved you, and I couldn’t take it from her.
“Sometimes when she spoke to me of you, she would start crying and I hated you for leaving us, for leaving her, for dying. I remember when I was a teenager I told her she should get married again, that I would be going off to college, and she needed to put you in the past. She needed to find someone else. She was so young and beautiful, I didn’t want her to be alone. I remember she’d only smile at me and say she was fine.” Then, suddenly, Becca said, “He came after me so he could get to you, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” Adam said. “That’s exactly right. But he didn’t know where Thomas was, so he came up with a way to flush Thomas out. He dumped you right in front of One Police Plaza.”
“What I don’t understand,” Thomas said, “is why he didn’t simply announce all over the media that he had her, threaten to kill her if I didn’t show myself in Times Square. He must have known that I would be there. But he didn’t.”
Adam said, “Who knows? Maybe a cop saw him, saw an unconscious woman in the backseat, and he was forced to dump Becca in order to escape. However, it’s far more likely that he planned this down to the exact spot he’d leave her. I think it’s gamesmanship. He wants to prove he’s better than you, smarter than all of us, and he wants you to suffer big-time in the process.”
“He’s succeeded admirably,” Thomas said. “He has flushed me out. I guess maybe that’s why he didn’t let you see him, Becca. He wants to keep playing this insane game. He wants to terrorize you and now he can continue the terror, with me squarely in the game with you.”
“And only he knows the rules,” Becca said.
“Yes,” Adam said. “I wonder if he’s been living on Crete all this time.”
“Probably so,” Thomas said.
“Wait,” Becca said, chewing on her bottom lip. “Now I recognize those curses—they were Greek.”
“That settles that,” Thomas said. “We’ve got all the proof we need that the ashes in that urn in the Greek morgue aren’t Krimakov’s.”
He leaned down and kissed Becca’s forehead. “I won’t leave you again. Now we’ll find Krimakov, and then you and I have a lot of catching up to do.”
“I’d like that,” she said. Then she smiled over at Adam, but she didn’t say anything.
TWENTY-ONE
Detective Letitia Gordon and Detective Hector Morales of the NYPD looked over at the woman who lay in that skinny hospital bed, looking pale and wrung-out, IV lines running obscenely into her arms, her eyes shiny with tears.
Detective Gordon cleared her throat and said to the room at large, “Excuse me,” and flashed her badge, as did Hector Morales, “but we need to speak to Ms. Matlock. The doctor said it was all right. Everyone out.”
Thomas straightened and looked at them, assessing them, quickly, easily, and smiled even as he walked forward, blocking their view of his daughter. “I’m her father, Thomas Matlock, detectives. Now, what can I do for you?”
“We need to speak to her now, Mr. Matlock,” Letitia Gordon said, “before the Feds get here and try to big-foot us.”
“I am the Feds, Detective Gordon,” Thomas said.
Detective Gordon cleared her throat. “It’s important, sir. There was a murder committed here in New York, on our turf. It’s our case, not yours, and your daughter is involved.” Why had she said all that? Because he was a big federal cheese, and that