She hurled the cell phone to the hospital floor with all her might. The phone’s plastic back sprung open, and the slim orange battery flew out, skidding to the wall in front of the chair.

Just then Perez appeared grinning in the doorway. “Honey, I’m home!”

She arranged her face into a wifely mask and turned sheepishly to the door. “Please don’t be mad,” she said, willing herself to act natural. “The nurse gave me your phone but I dropped it.”

“Damn, Charley.” Annoyance flickered over his handsome features. “It was a new one.”

“I noticed. Sorry.” She eased back into bed, watching her husband with new suspicion. “Did you buy one of those insurance contracts for it?”

“No.” He strode to the chair, bent down, and began picking up the pieces of the cell phone. “Looks like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men...”

“ . . . can’t put it back together again?” She finished his sentence with ersatz remorse.

“Nah, but that’s OK.” He slipped the plastic shards of the phone into his jacket pocket and turned to his wife with a smile she had loved so much it broke her heart.

Did you kill our baby?

Did you try to kill me?

But she wouldn’t ask him anything, just yet. She had to calculate her next move. Until she knew more, the best course was to keep her mouth shut and her eyes open.

She wasn’t Harry Middleton’s daughter for nothing.

14 - P. J. PARRISH

14

P. J. PARRISH

Kaminski stood at the window staring down at the inner harbor. A fog had rolled in and the lights of the buildings blinked back at her like eyes in the dark.

Her head was pounding—from bone-deep fatigue and the lingering effects of Faust’s Champagne. But also from fear.

She had never really felt fear like this before. Not when her parents disappeared and she was left on her own. Not when she had felt the press of the violin string against her neck when the man tried to kill her in Rome. Not even after she found out Uncle Henryk had been murdered.

But an hour ago, seeing the tattooed man bound in the closet, his bald head pouring blood, the cold, hammering fear began. It built as she heard him whimper as Faust whispered in his ear, as she saw his terrified tears, smelled the stench of his urine.

Shivering, she now moved away from the window, rubbing her hands over her arms. She scanned the suite’s living room, its oriental carpets and colonial furnishings. A mahogany bar dominated one corner, a gleaming baby grand piano the other. Off to the left, through open French doors, she could see one of the two bedrooms. Faust’s Vuitton duffle sat on the four-poster bed.