San Francisco Night by Stephen Leather Read Free Book Online Page B

Australian?”
    “British.”
    “But you have a US license?”
    “I’ve lived here for a while.”
    “Green card?”
    Nightingale nodded. “My wife’s American.”
    The officer nodded. “This is a residential area, sir, and people get a little nervous if they see strange cars parked here. Maybe you could find a mall car park to smoke in. That’s generally what I do.”
    “I’ll do that, thank you.”
    “No problem, sir. Enjoy your day.”
    She went back to the cruiser, but was obviously waiting for him to leave first. He reset the Satnav with the location of the Rite Aid on Hillsdale Boulevard where Mitchell had left his Porsche and drove away while she watched. He had no idea whether the cruiser had been on patrol, or whether someone had noticed a strange car and called it in. Either way, a surveillance job outside Speckman’s house wasn’t going to be possible. The officer would have logged his license and the car registration. He checked his mirror, just in time to watch a white Humvee drive out of Speckman´s gates and head in the opposite direction.
    He followed the ice blonde’s curt instructions but even with light traffic it took more than forty minutes to get to the Rite Aid. That ruled out the Speckman mansion as being the place where the nun was killed, but Nightingale had expected that. Finding the mansion where the killings were taking place was going to require more detective work. And probably a decent helping of luck.
     

CHAPTER 11
     
    The little middle-aged woman was talking. Her voice was soft but persistent, like a teacher twittering away at her young pupils, filling every moment of potential silence with inconsequential noise. “Ah, you’re awake, Mr. Mitchell,” she said. “I am sorry about the inconvenience. I’ll try not to keep you too long, I’m sure you have a thousand things to do. You’ve probably got quite the headache and aren’t feeling at your best. It’s a nasty little drug that, but very quick acting, you probably didn’t even feel the little prick.”
    Mitchell shook his head, and instantly regretted the decision - the left side of his face was on fire. He tried to raise his hand to it, but couldn’t move it. He dropped his gaze and saw the duct tape that held his wrists firmly to the arms of the chair. His ankles were bound to the chair legs. Something had been stuffed in his mouth and he couldn’t speak. He was naked. All his clothes lay, neatly folded, in a pile on the floor in front of him. The woman stood in front of him, her green tweed jacket on the sofa, her crisply-starched white blouse with the loose black bow at the throat reinforcing the image of the schoolmistress. Her graying brown hair was wrapped in a tight bun, and she wore black leather gloves.
    He moved his eyes, rather than his head, to look around. It was a large garage, though there was no car, just the sofa, a teak sideboard and the chair on which he was sitting. The chair was bolted to metal brackets, which were firmly fastened to the floor. Plastic sheeting covered the floor. In one corner stood a mop and bucket. The woman twittered on. “As I said, I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience, but I do have some questions for you.”
    Mitchell struggled to speak, but she put a cautioning finger to his lips.
    “Not yet, Mr. Mitchell. There’ll be time enough for you to speak later.”
    She walked across to the teak sideboard, picked up a small brass plate and held it in front of him. There was a blood-stained piece of flesh, placed exactly in the middle. Mitchell gazed at it in horror, and strained against the duct tape. Neither his wrists nor his ankles moved an inch.
    “Yes,” she said. “It’s a bit of a cliché this business of tying you to a chair, isn’t it. I do hope you won’t chide me for it. If I were on...er...home territory, so to speak, I’m sure I could have come up with something more imaginative which you might have appreciated a little more, but I’ve just