Vandermein

XIX

Marie was wrapped in duct tape and shackles as she laid seemingly lifeless on the hotel bed. Boone didn't take his eyes off of her, but his gaze was more apologetic than angry. It was clear to me that he still loved this woman, despite everything, but that a battle was now raging in his mind.

I wondered how I might have reacted if I learned Kenzie was out to kill me. Could I really bring myself to kill her first? Or would my heart be to broken to resist the sting of death?

"How long have you known?" Kenzie asked the detective.

"I've had my suspicions for a while," he confessed. "I was staking out her apartment for some time before the ship sank, though it needed to be done in the shadows. Imagine the optics of a detective stalking his ex-wife."

"And Veronica? Did you tell her?" Kenzie asked.

"There was no shaking her, but I couldn't tell her everything. I only hoped that the truth would reveal itself in time for my actions to be vindicated."

I piped in. "What about the black eye on your partner? Did you do that? Did you really attack that young woman?"

"I did." The detective seemed almost ashamed of his actions, but not completely. "I'm not a perfect person, Frank. However this all shakes out, I'm done for."

He then pulled out his bottle of vodka and took another long, wincing gulp. This was a man in the throes of grief and turmoil, suffering a thousand times more on the inside than the outside.

Everything was coming together now. The detective had been famously solitary in his personal life until he met Marie. I worried that his relationship might ruin our game, that he might become soft, distract himself with the white picket fence and Sunday barbeques.

I was worried he might neglect what we had.

But he was more than just his presence in my life. I had taken that for granted, I suppose. He wasn't the clean-cut boy scout I loved to torment; he was a work-obsessed, broken-hearted, wasteland of a cop at the end of his ropes.

Had I done this to him?

"You're a good cop, Bill." I tried my hand at comfort.

He only laughed at the sentiment. "Am I? Why are you still walking around free then? The two of you? An international art thief and a world-class celebrity criminal. I've been after you my whole career, and look what it's gotten me." He gestured to Marie on the bed.

So, he was blaming me for this.

I wanted to rebut his claim, argue that I was not at fault for his failed marriage. But wasn't I? Marie had probably been close to him just to keep the heat off of me so she could do...whatever it is she was setting out to do.

That was still a mystery. Why the kids? Why the ship?

Kenzie's phone started buzzing. "It's my mom. I have to take this." She left the room.

"Bill," I softened my voice as much as I could with the Vigor still in my system. "I never meant for this to happen."

He looked at me without malice, but with investigative curiosity. "Why do you care, Frank? Really, why do you care? Your whole thing is me first isn't it? You take care of you and yours and everyone else can go to Hell. You play these 'games' with the world for your own amusement and wealth and you pay no mind to the real human consequences that follow. You're a genius--a doctor!--and yet you've devoted your life to wasting mine and the tax payers' time. Did you really think we all just go home and put it out of our minds? Do you really think that your world is so small? You've engineered a way of villainy that never comes back to your wallet, to your secure little life, but now you're eating crow because your feelings are hurt?"

He stood up and looked at me without hatred, but with the stare of one man looking into the soul of another. "Fuck you, Frank."

Kenzie came back in. She surveyed the tense scene before getting my attention. "Mom had a visitor," she told me as she handed me the phone.

On the screen was a picture of Kenzie's four-foot-five elderly Korean mother wearing sunglasses almost as big as her head. She was holding a machine gun to the head of a bound and gagged Veronica.