Free A Rush to Violence by Christopher Smith

life. Eyes never lie. And when I look into theirs when I confront them, that’s the moment I’ll know for sure whether they killed your grandfather.”
     
     
     

 
     
     
     
    CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    In an area as large as Manhattan—never mind the surrounding boroughs—how does one find one woman out of millions of other women? It was different with every case, but there were two elements that always conspired to make it happen for Marty Spellman. Skill and luck.
    Mostly luck.
    While he’d like to think that the e-mail he sent to Camille Miller would turn out to be a mix of both, if that old account of hers was indeed active and she did reply, he’d be pointing straight at luck.
    Now, he had less than three days to find her. If he was unsuccessful, a member of his family would be murdered. While he wasn’t sure if that would happen given the safeguards he had in place to protect them, he wasn’t about to test the waters to find out. If they wanted his family dead, they’d find a way.
    And God help them if they did.
    Tonight, he was having dinner with his family at a public restaurant to celebrate his oldest daughter’s birthday. Beth was turning fifteen. With the exception of Jennifer, who knew nothing yet, his ex-wife Gloria and the rest of his family already knew there was a situation at hand that needed to be dealt with.
    As much as he wanted to change their plans, they couldn’t change. Carr’s people would be in the restaurant watching them while they ate, and they’d likely be listening while they talked. The good news? His ex-wife, her new husband and his children, had been trained. If anything like this happened, Marty was reasonably confident of their training. The only person he questioned was Katie, who was just eleven and not as sophisticated as her older sister. As for Jennifer, the moment they sat next to each other, he had to give her only one discreet sign for her to know trouble was afoot.
    He considered Camille Miller.
    In his line of work, he dealt with a high-end clientele who generally wanted to know a handful of things from him. In some cases, they wanted to find a missing spouse or a child, while other times they wanted to know the real reason a loved one was murdered or whether their partner was cheating on them. In the PI world, it was routine stuff, only for Marty, it came with better-paying clients.
    What he was involved in now was different than anything he had experienced in his years as a private investigator. He had been charged by a sophisticated group to find a woman whose former life was spent as a gifted international assassin.
    Marty learned from Carr and from the paperwork Carr gave him that Camille Miller didn’t live in this country. France was her home. Paris was her city and had been for twenty-one years. Although her family lived in New York, she kept no home here, not even a pied-à-terre retained for her and her daughter’s privacy when they came to visit. Instead, she and Emma stayed with her father in his penthouse on Sutton Place, which suggested a close relationship because, if anyone could afford to buy his daughter an apartment in New York City, if she wanted one, it was Kenneth Miller.
    Earlier, he wondered if she’d already left the States. It was a reasonable question, but a quick call to Roz, his contact at the FBI, suggested otherwise. Camille and Emma Miller had boarded no plane, private or otherwise, since they arrived to deal with the contesting of her father’s will. Had they left by car or by bus? That was a possibility, but Roz confirmed that no bus ticket had been purchased in Camille’s name and no car had been purchased or rented.
    Not that any of this meant much. Camille and her daughter likely had alternative identities and the appropriate IDs to back them up. They could take a plane or a bus with few worries. Also, cars were for sale by owner all over the city. All Camille Miller had to do was buy one, steal some plates and she’d be off