The Final Twist by Jeffery Deaver (free ebooks romance novels txt) 📕

helmet. Shaw walked to the BNGs and collected their guns. He put them into one man’s shoulder bag and set it by the motorcycle. He looked the men over. Neither was bleeding badly.

She glanced at the two Filipinos. Her gaze was clinical. Emotionless.

The woman, late twenties, had been a member and employee of the cult in Washington State where he had met Victoria Lesston—the cult he was just telling his brother about the charismatic—and dangerously narcissistic—clan leader had brainwashed her, and her fellow followers. She came to believe that if she were to kill herself, she would be reunited in the next life with her young daughter, who had died several years earlier.

There was no one near enough to have seen the incident. But they’d have to clean up quickly. He sent Russell a text telling him he was needed urgently, giving the GPS coordinates. He concluded:

Déjà vu alley two days ago, near library. Two injured this time.

Need Karin/Ty with van.

The reply was nearly instantaneous.

K.

Slipping his phone away, Shaw said to her, “Thank you.”

She nodded, still seemingly indifferent to what she’d just done. He wasn’t surprised at her reaction, nor with the vehicular assault in the first place. When he’d first seen her, last week, she had observed with no emotion the brutal beating of a reporter by the sadistic head of the cult’s security department. Shaw could still picture the three dots of the man’s blood on her blouse.

She walked the fifteen feet to the water’s edge and looked down. He joined her. He had plenty of questions, of course, but remained silent for a moment. Then:

“You got rid of the Honda.”

She nodded. “You spotted me. I had to.”

“So. How’d you get to San Francisco?”

After a moment she said, “At the camp? I talked to Journeyman Frederick and found out who you really were, that you’d been after this reward for Journeyman Adam, some crime they said he’d done. You were with him when he graduated.”

The cult’s troublingly sanitized term for suicide.

“He told me you had Adam’s notebook and that you were going to give it to his father, Mr. Harper. I drove to his shipping business in Gig Harbor and waited for you.”

Shaw couldn’t help but appreciate her clever, industrious detective work. And as for following him to San Francisco, if you’re going to be tailing a vehicle, when your subject is driving a thirty-foot motor home, your job is pretty damn easy.

“I was going to kill you. I didn’t have a gun. But I had my car. I was going to drive you off the road. I felt you ruined my life. You destroyed it. Everything he taught about coming back, it seemed so true. I believed it.” A sigh. “I remembered her face, her laugh, her little fingers—Jamie’s. My daughter’s . . . And all I could think was that you took away my chance to see her again. I wanted you to die. I was working up my courage. A couple times I almost hit you.”

“Eli did nothing but lie to you, to everybody. He wanted money and he wanted sex and he wanted power. Trying to sell immortality. It was all fake.”

“I know that now. Maybe I knew all along.” A sad smile. “Eli was pretty sharp. You can’t prove what he taught us doesn’t work.”

This was true. The only way to know for certain if there was an afterlife was to die, and nobody was going to send back social media pix from there, confirming the theory.

“The nails you threw into the street. You learn that from Journeyman Hugh?” The cult’s head of security.

“He said we needed to know how to stop enemies coming after us.”

“Why the change of heart, Adelle?”

She blinked, maybe at the use of her given name alone. In the cult you always used a prefix: at first “Novice,” then “Apprentice” and finally the coveted “Journeyman.”

Shaw had no idea what her last name was. Withholding those from members of the cult had been a way for the leader to control his sheep.

“I can’t really say. Maybe . . . Eli’s spell wore off.”

She’d hesitated again before mentioning the cult leader’s name. It was a serious breach of the rules to fail to refer to him as “Master Eli.”

She turned her eyes his way. “I kept thinking, you had to die . . . But I couldn’t get out of my head that you helped people. You saved lives. Hugh and Eli would have poisoned them. And you nearly got killed . . . So I couldn’t hurt you. It would just be wrong.”

Noise from the highway. A Lincoln Navigator appeared, paused and then drove to where Adelle and Shaw stood. Russell got out.

“This is Adelle. Russell.”

They nodded to each other and Russell looked over the BNGs. “How’d they make you?”

“Been here, asking about Blond. Maybe word got back.”

Now the same white van Shaw remembered from several days ago pulled up, and Karin and Ty got out. The other group ops weren’t present. Ty assessed one of the injured Filipinos and gave him an injection.

Shaw stirred.

Russell said, “Just a painkiller.”

The second man too was treated.

“We’ll drop them off at a hospital, take a picture of their licenses and tell them to get amnesia.”

Shaw said, “She needs to be safe. Out of the area. Where can you go?”

“My sister’s in Vegas.”

Russell said, “We’ll get you on a plane. It has to happen now.”

Adelle nodded.

“I’ll drive you to SFO.” He nodded at her Impala. “Report it stolen to the rental company.”

“But—”

“Report it stolen.”

“Okay.”

The car would be cubed within the day and in a scrapyard by tomorrow.

Russell asked, “You have things somewhere? A hotel?”

“Motel Six. Near the airport.”

Karin took a call, listened then disconnected. “Possible facial recognition hit on Blond from the alley. Came up at a joint OC task force in San Leandro. They’re cross-referencing. We should know soon.”

The brothers shared a glance. If they could get his ID, that might be enough to crack the code of the Hunters Point gang, which would lead to finding out who the SP family