Bad News Travels
- Автор: Суэйн Джеймс
- Серия: Lancaster & Daniels #3
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Thomas & Mercer
- ISBN: 978-1-5420-1644-5
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Bad News Travels». Краткое содержание книги:
No sooner do they arrive than suspicions are aroused. There’s the pair of Russians who seem to be watching every move the family makes. A final, cryptic phone call Martin Daniels made to his granddaughter. Strange blood evidence on his estate. More than $1 million missing from Martin’s account. And his cell phone, wiped clean, along with clues to a double life. To Beth, it’s disturbingly clear: the man she loved was a stranger.
As she and Jon delve into Martin’s past, they have no idea where the secrets will take them. Or how dangerous it will be to expose the conspiracies, the cover-ups, and the terrible truths of Martin’s life — and death.
He cursed. Dr. Sircy had told him that Martin was addicted to pornography, because she’d caught her lover looking at porn on his phone. But it was a false assumption. Martin was looking at videos that were being sent to him.
He’d made a beginner’s mistake. It wasn’t the first time.
His first week as a cop, he’d responded to a 911 call of a woman claiming a burglar was in her home. He went through the front door to find a bloodied man holding a broken bottle. He nearly shot the guy before noticing the suspect was wearing bedroom slippers. Not a burglar, but the caller’s estranged boyfriend, who hadn’t done a damn thing except tell his girlfriend their relationship was over.
He’d let the 911 call cloud his judgment, and hadn’t entered the house with an open mind. And now, he’d done the same thing with Martin. Dr. Sircy saying that Martin had a pornography addiction had made him believe that Martin really did have one, even though he’d seen no evidence of an addiction in Martin’s house, or among the books and papers in his study, or on his laptop. No evidence at all.
He’d let a jilted lover distort his thinking. He wanted to kick himself.
He rewound the video, and watched it again, this time from a fresh perspective. As he reached the end, his cell phone rang. It was his friend Hector calling.
“Hey, Hector. Tell me you have good news,” he said.
“I have good news and bad,” Hector said. “What order do you want it in?”
“Give me the bad news first.”
“There are two individuals in the porno on the guy’s phone. A male and a female. The female’s face isn’t visible. Sorry.”
“Any identifying marks or tattoos?”
“Yep. She has light-brown skin and a number of colorful tattoos on her back. I did a search of the tattoos, and got a hit. She’s a member of the Latin Kings gang.”
The girl in the video was one of Katya’s friends, and he found himself nodding.
“What’s the good news?” he asked.
“I was able to capture the face of the male, and blow it up,” Hector said. “Guy was right in the middle of having an orgasm. Pure ecstasy.”
“Was he an older guy?”
“Yes, indeed. Do you know him?”
“I think so. But I’ll need confirmation. Can you send it to me?”
“Of course. It will be in your inbox in a minute.”
“Thanks, Hector. I owe you big time.”
“Any chance there will be a premiere of your movie in South Florida before it’s released? It would be a blast to take my wife and kids to.”
Lancaster liked it. The producers were regularly calling him for help with the script, and he didn’t think it would be hard to finagle them into having a premiere in his hometown so he could invite his cop friends and drinking buddies.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
Ending the call, he went into the inbox on his laptop, and waited for Hector’s email to arrive. He was certain that it would be what he and Beth had suspected all along. One of Martin’s trysts had been secretly videotaped and used to blackmail him. The fact that the female in the video wasn’t Katya was a shock, but not entirely a surprise. Martin had been sexually active, and it wasn’t hard to imagine him having sex with one of Katya’s friends.
Beth’s rental had pulled into the parking lot, and she got out. In her hand was a cell phone, which she called him on. He answered it.
“I just arrived,” she said. “What room are you in?”
“103. I’m on the ground floor. I can see you through my window,” he said. “The door’s unlocked.”
Hector’s email appeared in his inbox with an attachment. He placed his cell phone down, and clicked his mouse on the attachment. The face of a man in full rapture filled the laptop’s screen. Lancaster’s mouth dropped open. The door opened, and Beth came in.
“You’re not going to believe what happened,” she said.
Still speechless, he continued to stare at the screen.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“My friend enhanced the video on your father’s phone,” he managed to say.
“And?”
“You’re not going to believe this.”
He had been wrong. The man having sex in the video wasn’t her father. She came over to the desk and had a look.
“Hey,” she said. “Isn’t that Sykes?”
Chapter 30
As an investigator, Daniels had been trained to look for patterns. If a suspect committed a crime once, it could be explained as bad judgment. But if the suspect committed the same crime repeatedly, it often meant darker forces were at work.
She also looked for patterns in the men she dated. She’d once dated a guy who chose the clothes he wore to work each week by laying them out on his bed on Sunday night. When she asked if he’d ever changed an outfit on the spur of the moment, he got angry with her. Another beau had ordered the same thing on the menu whenever they went to dinner. A question about dietary restrictions produced a dirty look.
Jon was also predictable, but in a different way. He was in love with the water, and tried to be near it whenever possible. Growing up, he’d lived near a canal, where he went fishing with his friends. During summer vacations he worked as a lifeguard, and spent his days on the beach. Upon graduating high school, he joined the navy and became a SEAL. Being near the water calmed him down, and made him happy.
At his suggestion, they went to the South Beach Grill, and sat at an outside table and had drinks while listening to waves slap the sand. Daniels flipped a coin. She won, and proceeded to tell him about the video conference with her boss at the FBI’s Jacksonville office, and how Micah’s video had ended up in her boss’s hands.
“I gave that kid a hundred bucks for that video,” he said, shaking his head.
“He must have thought he could get additional money from the local newspaper,” she said. “Watching it a second time was a real eye-opener.”
“How so?”
“I had no idea you were still so skilled at self-defense. You could have killed Sykes and his men.”
“My goal was to humiliate them, and at that I succeeded. What happens now?”
“J. T. wants you to restrain yourself. You’re linked to me, and therefore linked to the FBI. He’s afraid you’ll really hurt someone, and it will reflect badly on the bureau.”
“Is bad press all he’s worried about? What about your father’s death?”
“Come on, Jon. He’s just doing his job.”
Jon stared out at the ocean. A couple of long-haired kids were trying to break their necks on boogie boards. He said something under his breath, and a thin smile creased his lips. When he looked back at her, he’d noticeably calmed down.
“I’m not going to restrain myself,” he said.
“I didn’t think you would,” Daniels said. “Your turn.”
“We need to start our investigation over,” he said. “For starters, we have to stop thinking that your father was addicted to porn, and that his addiction was driving him to watch it at inopportune times. There wasn’t any porn in his study, or on his laptop, which would have been the usual hiding places.”
“What about the used condom in the bathroom?”
“Your father had a healthy sex life. Nothing wrong with that.”
“But he was looking at sex videos when he was out in public.”
“Not by choice.”
“I’m not following you. Of course it was by choice.”
“Not in the way that you think.” Taking out his cell phone, he held it in front of her face. “We are slaves to these devices. That’s especially true when we get texts, which are almost always from people that we know. When was the last time you got a text, and didn’t read it?”