Nancy Bush's Nowhere Bundle: Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide & Nowhere Safe. Nancy Bush

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      Swallowing hard, she moved into a late afternoon crowd just beginning to gather at their favorite bars and bistros for happy hour, merriment spilling onto the street from open doorways.

      Aaron, she thought, a smothered cry wrenched from her throat.

      Shhh . . . don’t think . . . don’t think . . . don’t draw attention. . .

      Blinking back cold tears, she turned into a sandwich shop with a long line of customers at their counter service and a smattering of tables.

      It had grown hot outside and she was overdressed, but she was shivering like she was consumed with fever as she took the only empty table, situated in the center of the room with a good view of the door and street.

      She collapsed into the seat like she’d just completed a marathon.

      It fell on Phillip Berelli to show September and Gretchen where the security tapes were. The man was fast losing what little control and backbone he’d ever possessed and was sprawled like a limp rag in a chair in Kurt Upjohn’s office, where there was a videotape monitor and a number of tapes. Upjohn had been taken in the ambulance earlier, and Aaron Dirkus in the coroner’s wagon. September and Gretchen were left with blood on the floor and asked by the techs to step around it, which they all did.

      “Mr. Upjohn is cautious,” Phillip said in a thready voice. “Paul . . . Paul de Fore gives him the security tapes . . . I think they look at them. It’s old-school technology but Kurt liked that. No one really thought it was that important. I mean, the door to the upstairs is always locked. That’s where everything is and you have to know the pass code. Kurt . . . Mr. Upjohn was vigilant about it.”

      “What about the main floor?” Gretchen asked.

      “Paul was . . . he cared . . . but it just wasn’t that important. Not really. There’s no reason to care. There’s nothing here. There’s nothing here.” He cut himself off on a hiccup.

      September had called in Ted, one of the techs, and he’d hit the rewind button on the tape currently being recorded. The tape stopped and he then pressed PLAY and they could see only one camera angle, but it encompassed most of the front parking area.

      “You can’t see the side door,” Berelli said on a swallow.

      “It’s all right. He came through the front,” September said.

      “Aaron was lax about the side door. They had a fight about it, Aaron and Kurt. Aaron just didn’t think keeping it locked mattered.”

      “But Mr. Upjohn felt it was worth keeping locked?” Gretchen asked.

      “He didn’t like the side door. I think that’s why . . .” He trailed off.

      “You think that’s why, what?” September asked.

      “I think that’s why Aaron was so lax about it. He just kinda wanted to needle his old man, and it worked.” He rubbed a hand viciously over his face as if to rub the whole tragedy away. “Aaron took the side door key and Kurt was mad.”

      “There he is,” Ted said.

      They all looked at the monitor. There, indeed, he was. The killer was one man. At least it looked like a man, dressed in navy pants, lace-up boots, a navy shirt like the kind security teams sometimes wore. A black vest. A black ski mask and a gun.

      “That’s a Glock,” Gretchen said.

      “He just walked up as boldly as you please,” September said.

      They ran it back again and watched it three more times. There was no sound and as soon as the man entered the building he disappeared.

      “Can’t see what vehicle he came from, but he sure didn’t walk far looking like that,” Gretchen said.

      “Does he seem nervous to you?” September asked.

      Gretchen considered the question. “No. He seems like he came here to kill some people, and that’s what he did.”

      “He sorta has a stutter-step. Right there.” September pointed to the screen where the man did a bit of a shuffle about three paces from the steps. “Like he’s hesitating.”

      “Maybe,” Gretchen conceded. She looked at the puddle that was Phillip Berelli. “We’d like you to come to the station, Mr. Berelli.”

      “Am I under arrest?” he squeaked out.

      “No, sir. We just want to talk to you somewhere—else,” Gretchen said.

      “I need to call my wife,” he said, his gaze sliding around the room.

      “We’ll call her on the way.” To the tech, she said, “See if you can get a close-up on that uniform. I don’t believe for one minute he’d be idiotic enough to wear something that connected him to a job, but maybe it’s a costume? From a costume shop? Or, like Goodwill or something?”

      “I’ll see what I can do,” Ted promised, as he pulled the tape from the recorder.

      “Did J.J. leave?” she asked, looking around.

      “With the Dirkus and de Fore bodies,” September answered her. She’d watched through the front windows as the coroner and an assistant had slammed the back of the wagon closed and pulled away, feeling slightly sick to her stomach.

      Phillip Berelli shivered and suddenly leapt up and ran for the bathroom again.

      Gretchen almost yelled something after him but thought better of it. To September she said, “How’re you doing?” but her voice held a hint of disparagement that did not foster honesty.

      “I’m okay,” she said, and felt Ted’s gaze slide over her quickly. She wasn’t fooling anyone.

      A few minutes later a white-faced and weak-kneed Phillip Berelli followed them out to the Ford Escape.

      The café was crowded, noisy and exposed. Liv would have liked a table in a corner, her back to the wall, with a view of the street instead of this one in the center of the room, but it was not to be. Her brain felt too big for her head and her pulse beat like angry, tribal drums inside her ears. Boom, boom. Boom, boom. Boom, boom.

      It was surreal. A dream. It wasn’t reality. She’d had a taste of that once before, of believing in lies and visions. It was a defense mechanism, Dr. Yancy had told her. Her own invention. A protection against her darkest fears.

      Protection? That wasn’t going to help her now. Now, she needed to think about truth.

      Why? she asked herself, seated in the uncomfortable café chair. There was a table of three teenaged girls between her and the window to the street. The girls were looking through the glass and talking about someone named Joshua, who may or may not have been right outside. One of them blew the paper off her straw at one friend who seemed the most obsessed with this guy. They were laughing and teasing and just hanging out. The kind of thing Liv might have done as a teenager if the bright, sassy six-year-old she’d once been hadn’t СКАЧАТЬ