“Any connection to the homicide?”
“We don’t know yet, but…”
That’s all Drex and Talia heard before they cleared the door. At the first opportunity, Drex pulled her out from under the bright lights of the porte cochere and into the shadows of the building. There he stopped.
“I thought we were in a hurry,” she said.
“Let’s wait here for a minute or two, see if anybody follows us out.”
“Police?”
“Jasper.” Thinking out loud, he said, “He killed that woman for no other reason than to draw me out, get me to make myself visible, so he could follow me. Follow me to you. I didn’t show, but he recognized Gif.”
“But how? From where?”
“Hell I know. I can’t figure that. Gif doesn’t just fade into the woodwork. He becomes the woodwork. But Jasper picked him out of that crowd.”
His eyes narrowed with wrath over what Jasper had done to Gif. “The calling card he left me was anything but subtle. If Jasper materialized in front of me right now, in any disguise, I swear to God I’d kill him.”
After waiting for several minutes and seeing no one worthy of a second look, he took Talia’s hand. Together they made their way to where she’d parked Gif’s car. Drex asked for the key. “I’m driving.”
“You may get lost.”
“I hope I do. It would make a tail more noticeable.”
Earlier that day, Jasper had bid Howard Clement a fond farewell. The man with a penchant for garishly printed shirts had served his purpose, but it had been time to assume another identity.
Tonight, as he’d moved among ordinary people looking very much like one of them, no one paid him any heed. Even if the woman he’d killed had seen him coming, she wouldn’t have felt threatened. Had she seen him as she walked alone across the dark and deserted parking lot—such a stupid thing for her to do—she probably would have smiled and wished him a good evening before turning her back to him to unlock her car door.
But she hadn’t seen him as he came out of the darkness and moved up behind her. The full nelson had taken her so unaware that she’d barely squeaked in surprise as he clamped his hands around her head like a vise, and forced it forward and down at such a steep angle that the vertebrae in her neck had snapped like twigs. Spine severed. She was dead. It had taken no time at all.
He’d left her where she fell and took a stroll out onto the wharf. It had been crawling with tourists who’d defied the inclement weather. He’d blended in. He’d walked all the way out to the end of it and stayed for several minutes to enjoy the view across the water. He had started back when he heard the first sirens’ whoops and wails like trumpeters announcing his achievement. He’d wanted to stop in his tracks and take a bow.
Wanting to be near the crime scene as the curious began converging, he’d picked up his pace, but not enough to be noticed. A reasonably sized crowd had already collected and continued to grow. He’d meandered among families, teenagers groping each other, packs of rambunctious young men, all bunching together, ebbing toward the concentration of police activity.
Jasper hadn’t cared to see the body. He’d seen it. He’d been on the lookout for Drex Easton.
He would come, just as he had to the beach. Of that Jasper had had no doubt. Easton would want either to confirm or rule out that this slaying was the handiwork of Jasper Ford. And Jasper had wanted him to know that it absolutely was.
Take that, Easton.
He’d wondered at what point Easton had initiated his chase? Jasper had been intuiting him for years, but he couldn’t pinpoint the time he had first sensed him. The knowledge that he had a pursuer hadn’t come to him in a jolt of awareness. It had been a seepage into his subconscious. When had it started? After Pixie? Before Loretta? Did Easton know of all his aliases, he wondered, going back all the way to Weston Graham?
How could he? Weston had existed thirty years ago. Easton would have been a boy.
He’d been speculating on how he had come to be the lodestar of Easton’s vocation when he did a double take on a man in the crowd. He was as colorless as a person could possibly be, but Jasper had recognized him instantly as Easton’s sidekick who’d been with him on the pier above the beach.
The man had bee
n observing the scene and looking into each individual face with the same studied casualness that Jasper boasted himself capable of doing. In an instant he had realized that the man was looking for him. But for Jasper Ford, not his newly assumed identity.
Jasper had really wanted to find Easton. Find him, find Talia.
But this opportunity had been too fortuitous to pass up. The gift horse, so to speak.
Jasper had kept the man in sight and carefully stayed out of his. He’d bided his time, allowing the crowd to thicken until it had become difficult to wade through the newcomers asking what had happened and craning their necks in order to see.
Eventually he had worked his way around until he was walking directly toward the man. There was a cluster of people within touching distance of them, but no one noticed when Jasper socked the man hard.