The Final Twist, Jeffery Deaver [philippa perry book TXT] 📗

Russell frowned. “Burglars? Hmm.”

“Who’d you really think we were?” Shaw asked.

“From BlackBridge?” Russell asked.

The man froze and then looked down. It was as if the very word paralyzed him. He gave the faintest of nods.

“We’re not,” Shaw said.

Russell tapped the grip of his SIG Sauer. “If we were BlackBridge, you’d be dead. Right?”

La Fleur rubbed his wrists. He reached for a bong and a lighter on the chair-side table.

“No,” Russell said.

“You want some?” he offered the stained glass tube. Both men ignored him. He put it down.

“Amos Gahl’s mother told us about you.”

His face softened “Eleanor! How is she?”

“She’s fine.”

“And her husband? Mort.”

“Apparently okay,” Shaw said. “He was out. Now, Earnest. We need your help. Amos found some evidence against BlackBridge. We think it’s proof about the Urban Improvement Plan. You know about it?”

He frowned, taking this in. He remained cautious. “Who are you?”

“Our father,” Shaw said, “was killed by Irena Braxton and Ebbitt Droon. Ian Helms too.”

“Your father?”

“Ashton Shaw. Did you know him?”

“I don’t remember the name. But there was somebody . . . wild-eyed, like a cowboy.”

Russell displayed the picture.

“That’s him. He stopped me outside where I was living. He told me he was a professor and one of his students had been killed by BlackBridge.”

“Todd Zaleski, a city councilman.”

La Fleur squinted. “That was it, yes! Supposedly a robbery but your dad didn’t believe it. Like you guys—he was looking for what Ame had taken from BlackBridge. I told him I couldn’t help him. He left and I never heard from him again.”

“You were close to Amos, his mother told us.”

A nod and his weathered lips drew taut.

“Will you help us? Whatever Amos found is in a courier bag. He hid it somewhere in the Bay Area.”

Eyes again on the floor, La Fleur mumbled, “I don’t know anything. I swear to God.”

In the rewards business, Shaw had done a fair amount of kinesics analysis—using body language to spot deception. Included in that fine art was noting verbal tics. Anyone who ends a sentence with the assurance that they’re not lying probably is, and it’s a double hit if a deity is invoked.

Shaw stared at him until La Fleur added, in a whisper, “BlackBridge is the devil—the whole company. Everybody. Not just Helms and Braxton. It’s like the buildings are evil, the walls are evil . . . It’s so dangerous. Why do you think I’m living like this?”

“Don’t you want Helms to go to prison for what they did to your friend?” Shaw asked.

The man looked away.

Shaw felt frustration. This man knew something. He said, “There’s a family that Droon and Braxton are going to kill tomorrow.”

La Fleur’s face revealed some concern at this. “Why?”

Russell: “We don’t know.”

“We find Amos’s evidence and go to the FBI. They arrest Ian Helms and Braxton and Droon. We stop the killing. Help us save them.”

Russell stirred impatiently. Shaw had refined his interviewing and interrogation skills over the years in seeking rewards. Though he could be firm, he generally used logic, empathy and humor to win over the subjects. He suspected his brother took a somewhat different approach.

Shaw persisted. “You and Amos met at Eleanor’s house a few times. You met there because she hadn’t been ‘Gahl’ for years. She’d remarried and changed her name. So Braxton and Droon wouldn’t know about her.”

Shaw studied La Fleur patiently until he decided, it seemed, it wasn’t too incriminating to answer. “That’s right.”

“What did Amos tell you when you were over at his mother’s, the last time you met?”

He fidgeted, played with the bong. “Nothing. Really! We just chatted. Chewed the fat.” His evasive face gave a smile. “My grandmother used to say that. When I was a kid I never knew what it meant. I still—”

Russell snapped, “What did Amos tell you?”

Shaw said patiently, yet in a firm voice, “They’re going to murder a family. There was a note we found, a kill order. It didn’t say ‘target’ singular or ‘couple.’ Husband and wife. It said ‘family.’ That means children. We have no idea who they are and we’ve only got twenty-four hours to find out and save them.”

Russell said nothing more. With dark, threatening eyes he stared at the man.

Good cop, bad cop.

“The evidence,” Shaw said. “Amos was going to hide it. I think you know where.”

La Fleur shook his head vehemently. “No, no, no! We didn’t talk about anything like that. We talked about plants, fertilizer.”

“At midnight?”

“How did you know that’s when we met?” The man’s eyes grew alarmed.

Shaw hadn’t, but it was logical.

“I’m a gardener. Look outside!” He uttered a forced laugh. “My last name, you know. ‘Flower’ in French. Amos was into plants too. We had some wine and talked about gardening.” The sadness returned.

Russell shot a glance to his younger brother, who handed off the interview to him, easing back and falling silent.

As Russell leaned close, La Fleur shied, kneading his hands into fists then opening his fingers. Over and over. “I’ll send an anonymous text to BlackBridge, attention Braxton and Droon. It’ll have two items in it. One, your name. Two, your address.”

“What?” A horrified whisper.

“When they come at you with their M4 assault rifles, your arrows aren’t going to do anything but piss them off.”

Bad cop had become worse cop.

His shoulders slumped. He sighed. “I’m probably screwed anyway. They tracked you on your phones.”

“We have shielded and encrypted burners,” Shaw said.

He didn’t seem to believe them. “Oh yeah? What’s your algorithm?”

“AES, Twofish and Scorpion.”

With a glance toward Shaw, Russell said, “That’s mine too.” Curiously the brothers had, on their own, picked the same encryption package.

La Fleur snapped, “Let me see.”

Russell offered his phone. La Fleur grabbed and studied it, then for some reason shook the mobile as if to see what kind of data would rattle out. He examined the screen once more. He handed it back. He seemed marginally relieved and didn’t bother with Shaw’s unit.

The man’s zipping eyes settled on the knotty-pine floor. He rose and walked to a