He turned away from the redneck and watched with mounting pleasure as the activity on the beach increased. The audience of onlookers on the pier expanded. Jasper delighted in the comments he overheard.
If they only knew who they were rubbing shoulders with, he thought.
He had been on the pier for over an hour when he was jostled along with others near him who were being elbowed out of the way by a man plowing his way to the railing.
Drex.
Jasper experienced a jolt of alarm.
But he soon realized that Drex wasn’t looking for him. He was fixated on what was taking place on the beach. He’d made it just in time to catch the final act: that of the body being carted away.
Once the ambulance was gone, Jasper allowed himself to be shuffled along with the crowd as it vacated the pier. A bottleneck formed at the steps. Jasper waited his turn, then flip-flopped down. But he didn’t go far, because Drex had stayed behind, gazing out across the water, hands gripping the railing, his body as taut as a bowstring.
Which confirmed what Jasper had suspected all along. He wasn’t who he claimed to be, and he wasn’t writing a novel. One didn’t bug one’s neighbor’s house unless one had a reason for doing so. And now this drowning death had left him obviously upset, which was disproportionate to how long he’d known Elaine.
From the start, the timing of his arrival to the neighborhood had made Jasper uneasy because it had coincided so closely—mere months—with the discovery of Marian Harris’s remains.
That had come as a shock. One evening he had returned home from an errand to find Talia in her study, crying her heart out.
“Remember I told you about my friend Marian who lived in Key West?”
“Of course. The one who went missing a couple of years ago.”
“I just heard from a mutual friend,” Talia had said as she blotted up tears. “They found her remains buried in a shipping crate. It was horrible.”
It certainly had been horrible news to him. None of the others had ever been found. This was an unwelcome first, and it had rattled him. He was brilliant. He didn’t make mistakes. But he would be a fool to ignore the possibility that he might.
He wouldn’t commit a major gaffe. No, the oversight would be something minor, inane, ridiculous, something that, because of its sheer triviality, a genius like him would never think to avoid.
That evening, while Talia was mourning the grisly death of her friend, he had resolved that the time had come for Jasper Ford to evaporate.
His marriage to Lyndsay had been brief, but rife with drama. After her, he’d sworn to remain a bachelor and, for thirty years, he had. Then, ill-advisedly as it turned out, he’d experimented with matrimony again. The intimacy of the union, inside the bedroom and out, spawned risks he hadn’t foreseen when he’d asked for Talia’s hand. Choosing her in particular had been a miscalculation. He would have been better off selecting a bubblehead like Elaine.
Talia was far too perceptive. He had sensed her gradually increasing mistrust, which had resulted in last night’s accusation of an affair. He had never slept with Elaine, but that Talia sensed something amiss was his cue that it was time to bid farewell to Jasper Ford.
But how to go about it had presented him with a unique problem: He had two women to dispose of this time. He couldn’t leave either Talia or Elaine alive to search for him. He was confident that he was up to the challenge of their termination, but the solution had to be well thought out, methodically planned, and precisely executed.
But then Drex’s unexpected appearance had thrust Jasper’s strategy into overdrive. He’d sowed seeds of doubt about their neighbor in Talia’s mind, hoping to thwart any interaction between them until he could formulate another plan.
Then—bless her!—Talia’s mention of a getaway had opened up an opportunity.
Even better, he could broadcast it using the transmitter that Drex had planted. Talk about a backfire. It had been too delicious.
He’d acted quickly, but efficiently, and so far everything had gone splendidly.
But now here Drex was, playing fly in the ointment again.
Jasper risked making himself conspicuous by loitering near the pier, but within minutes another man joined Drex. They talked briefly, then, in a decisive manner, Drex turned away from the railing. The two of them strode along the pier and descended the steps in a hurry. They walked past him without giving him a second glance.
Jasper dismissed the other man as a sidekick.
But he was struck by Drex’s unfamiliar demeanor. No jaunty gait, no dimpled smile. This Drex was no aw-shucks wannabe. There was an intensity about him, an angry determination in his bearing. It couldn’t be mistaken. It definitely couldn’t be dismissed.
And with that thought, the freshly cut hair on the back of Jasper’s neck stood on end.
Drex Easton was him.
Jasper had been feeling him for years, an unknown entity who was invisible, but whose presence he felt. A shadow. Untouchable, but there. More often than he wanted to admit, he would sense him like a ghostly waft of cool air. He would awaken and imagine a menacing presence hovering over him while he slept. Sometimes, in a crowd, he would whip around suddenly in the hope—and fear—that he would spot him, that he would be able to pick him out in a sea of unknowns.