“I’ll ask Thomas about other routes up and down the mountain,” Stone said. “He’ll know.”

Back at the cottage, Holly produced a satellite telephone and went outside to call Lance. She returned after a few minutes. “Irene has some savings besides her pension and an inheritance from her father, for a total of a little over two million dollars,” she said.

“That ought to be enough to buy a house here and renovate it,” Stone said. “We’ll ask Thomas; he probably knows what she paid; he seems to know everything else around here.”

They had lunch served by Jacob on their terrace, and in the middle of it their telephone rang.

Jacob came out of the house with a cordless phone. “It’s Mr. Hardy for you,” he said, handing the phone to Stone.

“Hello?”

“I thought you’d like to know that Irene Foster just came into the dining room for lunch,” Thomas said, “and she’s with a man I’ve never seen before.”

9

Stone and Holly walked into the dining room, took seats at the bar and, without looking around, ordered piña coladas. They made a point of gazing into each other’s eyes and touching a lot, then Holly turned toward the tables and leaned against the bar.

“See them?” Stone asked.

“Give me a minute,” she said. “It’s crowded.” She looked some more. “Don’t turn around, but I’ve got ’em. I think.”

“Well, is it they, or is it not?”

“Okay, it’s Irene. I’ve never seen the guy before.”

“Describe him.”

“Don’t know about height; he’s sitting down. Mid-fifties, reddish brown hair, gray at the temples. It’s like that color when men use something to cover the gray? I don’t know why they bother, it’s so noticeable. He’s heavier than Teddy.”

“People gain weight.”

“They don’t grow hair,” she said. “From here, it doesn’t look like a wig, and the first time I saw Teddy-both times, I guess-he was wearing wigs. But his colleagues at the agency said he had been going bald for years, and the last time they saw him, he was nearly completely bald on top.”

“Hair transplants?”

“On St. Marks? Before that, I don’t think he had the time; he was a busy fellow, killing people.”

“Did he really kill the speaker of the house, Efton?”

“The FBI thinks so, but there was no physical evidence to connect him to the crime. The Agency thinks he killed that Supreme Court justice, the young one who died in the auto accident.”

“The one who drove off a mountain in Maryland?”

“Right.”

“And a Secret Service agent was driving his car?”

“An SUV.”

“Why does the Agency think he was murdered? I never read anything about that in the papers. It was an

icy road in the mountains.”

“It took nearly a year to figure it out, but the secret was in the chip that controlled the car’s electronic stability system.”

“A faulty chip?”

“Not faulty; altered.”

Tags: Stuart Woods Stone Barrington Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net