The Julian Secret (Lang Reilly Thrillers) by Gregg Loomis Read Free Book Online Page B

much about it.” She stopped and opened a door. “This is it.”
    Lang walked into a room equipped as an office might be: two desks, two computers, each with a printer. Government-issue bookshelves, gray metal, lined one wall filled with stacks of papers, books, and a dinner plate with a thriving colony of mold.
    “You and Sonia have cleaned up?” Lang wanted to know.
    “That’s what I was doing while Sonia went to the airport.” She nodded to the increasing green on the plate. “As you can see, I haven’t finished. That’s why I booked you into a hotel. Sonia won’t come in here. She’s the one who found Daddy when she came to work the day before yesterday. He was lying right here,” she pointed, “partially blocking the door.”
    Lang took a closer look around the room. “If he was blocking the door, how . . . ?”
    “The room adjoins another,” Jessica said. “In fact, almost all of the bedrooms in the house adjoin each other. It used to be a method of ventilation.”
    And assignations
, Lang thought but did not say. Don Juan’s largely boastful memoirs were full of adjoining bedchambers. “Did the police check the other rooms?”
    “I—I guess so. You’ll have to ask Sonia. I didn’t get here until yesterday. I called you before I left. Anyway, Sonia was here when the police inspected the place.”
    Gurt had been poking through the stacks of papers. She held up several. “These are research notes all. Does anyone have the manu, manu . . .”
    “Manuscript,” Lang finished.
    “Does anyone have a copy of the whole manuscript?”
    Jessica shook her head. “According to Sonia, there was only one complete copy, but it is missing along with the computer’s hard drive.”
    So much for the theory Don Huff was killed for something other than the manuscript.
    “And this?” Gurt was holding up a small metal filing box full of index cards, a device that reminded Lang of how he wrote term papers in the age before computers.
    Jessica shrugged again. “I don’t know. I hadn’t seen Dad in over two years, had no idea even how he was going about his writing.”
    Lang took the box from Gurt. Each card had a single name, address, and what Lang gathered to be phone numbers at the top. Under that were one or two words in what looked like German. The rest of the card had handwritten dates, some as recent as two weeks ago.
    Lang handed it back to Gurt. “What do you make out of the cards?”
    She flipped through slowly. “It is a list of subject matter and people. For instance, here is someone with a reference to the Nuremberg Trials, another with reference to a parachute jump over Crete.”
    “What does that all have in common?” Lang asked.
    No one had an answer.

C HAPTER F OUR
    Hotel Alphonso XIII
17:30 (the same day)
    A call to the police station from Don Huff’s house had informed Lang that Inspector Pedro Mendezo, the investigating officer, observed the usual siesta and would return to duty around 18:00, six o’clock. With nothing better to do and the shops shuttered for the next four hours, Gurt and Lang had returned to the hotel. Before succumbing to jet lag, they had made love, a wild and noisy affair that Lang suspected could be heard all the way down the sumptuous hall.
    Neither cared.
    Refreshed and sated, they awoke famished.
    “Should I telephone the room servicers?” Gurt asked.
    “Room
service
. No, let’s go out,” Lang called back from a shower that far exceeded those in most European hotels.
    This one allowed the bather to actually stand ratherthan squat in a tub while using a flexible hose with a nozzle at one end. The normal arrangement reminded him of the German word for shower,
Dusche
. Stepping out of the shower, he helped himself to a luxurious robe and walked into the other room, where Gurt was lighting her first cigarette of the day.
    “Do you have to?” he asked.
    “You smoke cigars,” she replied, shaking out a match.
    “Once or twice a month, maybe.”
    “So your