Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(68)

Something comes back to him then—a thought so disturbing that Mike is certain he’s still alive, because everyone knows that when you’re dead, there’s no pain. And this is painful.

Not physically. There is no physical pain, only immobility.

But remembering how he glimpsed, for a split second through the windshield, the person who was behind the wheel of that car—the person who was gunning right for him—he realizes he’d been wrong about something crucial to the Cavalon case.

Mike Fantoni doesn’t like to be wrong. He prides himself on the fact that he rarely ever is. He’s built a reputation on it. His clients count on it.

His clients…

Mike Fantoni’s last thought before he drifts back to the peaceful silence is that someone needs to warn Brett and Elsa.





CHAPTER ELEVEN




Located almost midway between New York and Boston on the busy I–95 corridor, New Haven, Connecticut, is a prime location for drug dealers and the addicts and prostitutes who go with the territory. As a longtime vice detective with the NHPD, Bill Ellsworth has seen it all—and then some—particularly here in the neighborhood of Fair Haven on the banks of the Quinnipiac River.

A light rain is falling as he strides toward the overgrown vacant lot in a seedy stretch just off Chapel Street. It isn’t the first time he’s been summoned to this area, a favorite haunt of hookers and their johns, many of whom are from the surrounding shore towns. It isn’t even the first time he’s seen a woman lying facedown here amid the broken glass and syringes.

But it’s the first time this particular area is cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape, and the woman on the ground isn’t passed out cold from last night’s crack binge.

She’s dead.

Not an OD, though. She got her throat slit. And she’s been here at least a day or two, judging by the insects nesting in her flesh.

Jim Novak, the first officer on the scene, had been summoned by a couple of twelve-year-olds who found her while cutting through the lot. Spotting Bill, Novak turns away from his animated conversation with a uniformed rookie.

“Look who’s here. When’d you get back?”

“Late last night,” Bill tells him, fighting a yawn. More like early this morning, by the time he and his wife had gotten their luggage and driven home from the airport.

“Where’d you go this time?”

“The Caribbean.”

“Nice.”

Bill nods. Nice doesn’t begin to cover it.

If there’s anything he’s learned on this job, it’s that life is short and unpredictable. You’d better do everything you want to do and see everything you want to see while you have the chance, because you never know whether you’re going to be around tomorrow.

He and Tina won’t retire young or rich; they’ve spent every vacation day and every dime they have on travel, mostly by ship. At ports of call all over the world, they’ve seen ancient ruins and exotic wildlife, cathedrals and pyramids, volcanoes and caverns, and, on this last trip, the most breathtaking beaches on the planet.

And now, back to reality.

Bill surveys the corpse. “Any ID on her?”

“What, are you kidding me?”

“You never know.”

“That’d make life too simple, Ellsworth.” Novak goes back to the rookie, shooting the shit about the Red Sox.

Pulling on a pair of plastic gloves, Bill steps past Dave Rivera, the police photographer, who’s snapping his bubble gum as he shoots the scene from every angle.

“How’s it going, Bill?”

“TGIF,” Bill mutters dryly, studying the victim.

He can’t see her face, but she’s skinny and pale with jet black hair, wearing a black skirt, black top, and—oddly—black platform-soled boots with studded buckles. Not exactly typical footwear for a working girl around here.

There’s dried blood matted in her hair and on her shoulders beneath the wounds on either side of her neck. Her right arm is bent up near her head, as if she’d tried to shield herself from the attack.

“Such a shame to see a nice religious kid like her killed right down the street from St. Rose’s, huh?” Rivera comments, leaning in to get a close-up of what Bill had assumed, at a glance, was a bruise on her arm above a leather-studded bracelet.

“What do you mean?”

“Her ink. She’s got a nice fancy cross there, see it?”

Bill waves off a fly and bends over to take a closer look at the corpse.

“First of all, she wasn’t killed in this spot. There’s not enough blood. Someone dumped her here. The other thing is…that’s no cross,” he informs Rivera, pointing at the tattoo. “It’s a hieroglyphic symbol.”

“What makes you think that?”

Bill levels a look at him. “I don’t think it—I know it. I’ve been to Egypt. And by the way—it’s called an ankh.”



This was the longest stretch Marin’s been away from home in months. Maybe that’s why the apartment feels oddly empty as she crosses the threshold.

“Hello…girls, I’m back!”

She can’t help but compare the sterile entry hall to the Walshes’, with its pleasant clutter of personal belongings. Here, everything is perfectly staged for the real estate sale; a reminder that soon the place will belong to somebody else.