Private #1 Suspect (Private 2)

I had twenty-twenty vision, and as a pilot I’d been trained to see anomalies from the air: a puff of dust, a moving shadow, a glint of steel ten thousand feet down in the dark.

I noticed this woman, but I blocked out that something was wrong with her attitude, her posture, her looks—something.

I walked away from her. I put my card key into the slot, opened my hotel room door—and felt a stunning blow to the back of my head.

I went down.

When I came to, the pain radiating from the back of my head was dazzling. I recognized the sunburst patterns on the carpet under my chin. I was on the floor of a room at the Beverly Hills Sun.

I closed my eyes, awoke to the shock of ice water in my face. The woman I’d seen at the bar and then again in the hallway was stooping over me, her hands on her knees, and she was cursing. I didn’t understand her thick Irish accent, but I knew her eyes.

They were Colleen’s eyes.

I said, “Colleen,” and she began cursing again. Through the pain, and as my vision cleared, I saw that although this woman resembled Colleen, she was older.

“Siobhan?”

The cursing intensified.

I pulled myself up into a sitting position and screamed back into her face, “I don’t understand you. Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

“Aym nah shuh’in’ up, Jack-o,” Colleen’s sister shouted into my face. “Nah ’til ye tell me why you kilt ’er.”

CHAPTER 49

I’D BEEN BEATEN twice in the past twenty-four hours and both times by people who had loved Colleen. First Donahue had clocked me. He’d also apparently told Siobhan where to find me. And now I’d been clobbered by Siobhan.

The couch was a beauty, eight feet of down-filled cushions. I took a seat and put my feet up on the coffee table next to the sap Siobhan had used to knock me down.

Siobhan was tough, but she brought me a pillow, then took a bottle of water out of the bar fridge and gave it to me. She sat in the chair across from me and stared at me.

“Start talkin’,” she said.

I did. I told her repeatedly that I hadn’t killed Colleen. I explained where I’d been when Colleen had been shot, and I told her how much I cared about her sister.

“You made love to her,” Siobhan said accusingly. “Colleen called to say you took her to bed before you left Los Angeles. Do you deny it?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You were fooling with her.”

“I loved her. Just not enough to give her what she wanted,” I said.

I thought about Colleen’s last birthday. We’d gone to dinner at Donahue’s, sat at the same table where I’d sat with him last night. Donahue and a gang of waiters had brought out the birthday cake and sung to Colleen.

She had started out very happy that night.

I had known that, after a year of going out, what Colleen wanted for her birthday was a ring.

I had let her down. The best I could do had hurt her, terribly.

“You loved her? Then I don’t understand ‘not enough,’ ” Siobhan said. Her lips trembled. Tears slid down her cheeks. “Why would you have taken her to bed if you meant nothing by it?”

“Why did you sap me?”

“I had to do it.”

I paused to let her words stand alone.