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

Braxton surprised Shaw by saying in a raw, wounded voice, “You didn’t need to kill him. He would have surrendered.”

Shaw didn’t respond. It would have been a push-pull conversation, since, no, Droon would not have surrendered and was a second away from shooting Shaw, in the first case, and stabbing him in the heart, in the second. The strangulation too.

The woman was clearly shaken by Droon’s loss. This seemed out of character for her, a person who’d ordered the torture or handled the execution of any number of people. Maybe there’d been more to their relationship. Shaw had to admit that he found it bordered on unpleasant to picture romance between them, but who was he to judge when it came to matters of the heart, thought the Restless Man, whose track record in love was not stellar.

As Russell remained standing, a guard of sorts, Shaw crouched in front of Braxton and Helms, who said, “I’m not saying another word without my lawyer.”

“We’re not cops. We’re not recording anymore. This isn’t about evidence.”

“Then?” Braxton muttered.

“We assume the SP hit is off now. Can you confirm that?”

A pause. “The what?” she asked.

Shaw looked from her to Helms. “If that family dies, it’ll come back on you. We’ll make sure of that. If the motive is to kill a witness, that’s capital murder. Death penalty in California.”

Helms appeared perplexed.

Russell said, “Give us the name.”

Shaw, again in the good-cop role: “We’ll tell the U.S. attorney you cooperated. That’ll go a long way in your favor.”

“Who the hell is SP?” Helms muttered. He turned to Braxton, who shook her head. She too seemed confused.

Shaw glanced at Russell. “Show them.”

Russell took his phone and displayed the picture of the note that Karin had found on Blond’s body, the kill order.

Confirmation from Hunters Point crew.

6/26, 7:00 p.m. SP and family. All ↓

Helms muttered, “I have no idea what that is.”

Braxton shook her head yet again.

Russell said, “The Stanford library the other day? The man with Droon? This kill order was in his pocket.”

Braxton said, “He was just a friend of Ebbitt Droon’s. He was meeting him at the library to drop something off. Whatever that’s about, the note isn’t about one of our projects.”

“He didn’t work for BlackBridge?”

Helms said, “No.”

The words—and the timbre of their voices—had moved Shaw from ten percent alert to ninety percent. He was in set mode.

Shaw asked Braxton, “Who is he?”

“Security. Works for a subsidiary of Banyan Tree.”

“Name. Give me his name.”

Russell crouched and leaned very close. His brother’s chosen method for retrieving information.

“He’s . . .” Braxton thought for a moment. “I think it’s Richard Hogan.”

Russell rose and said to his brother, “We got it wrong. Devereux’s the one that wants SP dead, not BlackBridge.”

“So the hit’s still on.” Shaw looked at his phone.

Three hours until the family died.

71

The brothers obtained Richard Hogan’s address nearly simultaneously.

Shaw had sent a request to Mack, Russell to Karin.

Shaw’s phone dinged first, but only seconds before his brother’s.

The place where the hitman had lived was a yellow Victorian-façaded townhome in the shadow of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. An upmarket neighborhood. At first Shaw found this surprising, given Hogan’s career—muscle work and kill orders—but Shaw supposed that Jonathan Stuart Devereux paid well.

Russell parallel parked on a steep incline and spun the wheel to chock the tire against the curb. Signs warned drivers to do this. Shaw supposed that the odds of a vehicle with an automatic transmission slipping out of park were minimal, but why not go the extra step? The incline had to be twenty degrees.

They climbed out of the SUV and Shaw dipped his head as two red-masked parrots zipped past. He noted several more, twitchily observing the street from the branches of a maple tree. Another pair was perched nearby too. The birds had made this neighborhood their own.

He and Russell crossed the street and approached the front door slowly, in a tactical formation, away from windows and the door itself. Hogan was no more, and Karin’s information revealed he was single, but he might have had roommates, who were fellow Devereux employees. Or a lover in the same line of murderous work that he had pursued.

It was just the two of them now. Ty and Victoria had to keep an eye on Helms, Braxton and the other ops until the agents arrived from Denver.

Shaw and his brother looked through the windows, fast and carefully. The living space appeared unoccupied.

“I can’t pick these.”

Russell too examined the two deadbolts. He tapped his own shoulder and Shaw nodded.

Stepping three feet back, the brothers paused and looked around. The street was deserted.

Russell charged forward and crashed into the wood. The heavy panel slammed inward as if the hardware were skimpy tin.

The men fanned out, guns drawn, clearing the sparse place. Lacking in furniture, that is, but there were weapons and ammunition aplenty, computers, tactical gear, phones—cellular and satellite, clothing and body armor.

Russell held up an ID badge with Hogan’s picture on it. The subsidiary he worked for within the Banyan Tree family was Sequoia Pest Removal.

The computers were passcode protected, as were the phones. Not impossible for an outfit like Russell’s group to hack, Shaw supposed, but SP’s family had only hours to live. Cracking the electronics would have taken too long.

Shaw said, “The kill order was handwritten. Let’s look for paper.”

They began rifling through stacks of documents that sat on Hogan’s kitchen table and a precarious card table that served as a makeshift desk.

Shaw’s pile was mostly receipts, maps, instruction booklets for newly purchased weapons, company memos that had nothing to do with the kill order, checkbooks and ledgers that showed transfers into banks in the Caribbean.

“Got something here,” Russell said. Shaw joined him as he spread a sheet of paper flat on the desk.

It has come to my attention that a whistleblower, SP, has discovered the purpose of our Waste Management program. Following was found on his personal computer through a deep-hack:

“Banyan Tree is