Free Judgement and Wrath by Matt Hilton Page B

the adjoining properties the task of sifting through the rubble would have began. They’d be pulling out charred corpses by now.
    OK, give them a little time. Florida’s bravest had a difficult job to do.
    Charred corpses often took time to identify.
    But it was annoying that the client hadn’t the belief in him to accept that he’d done exactly what he agreed. Just in a more dramatic fashion.
    There was, of course, another reason why the fee had not been delivered to his account.
    The client had sent a killer after Dantalion. Why pay money to languish in an account as dead as the man with the codes to access it?
    Dantalion would show Petre Jorgenson the error of such thinking.
     

13

    What surprised me most was that Bradley Jorgenson didn’t run directly to the police. He was a man of power and could have demanded that the weight of the entire force be thrown into finding who had been responsible for the attack on his home. Instead, he seemed reluctant to cooperate with the officers on the case, stonewalling and throwing up barriers in the form of highly paid legal advisers to allow him immunity from the ensuing investigation.
    It wouldn’t last, but for now Jorgenson and Marianne Dean were in hiding and refusing to answer any questions.
    In some respects their refusal to talk was a relief. I didn’t want to spend half the day answering questions and denying allegations that I was anything other than a concerned citizen who had tried to intervene during a murder spree. Marianne could easily have dropped me in it by talking about our meeting in the garden before the killer’s arrival. That would have shown that I had more than chance involvement. Some could even read into my presence at the scene something that wasn’t true: foreknowledge of what was about to happen. In some schools of thought, that would make me an accessory to the crime, and I’d be seeing much more of the inside of police stations. At the very least my movements would be curtailed, and I would be useless to Marianne. There’d be no way I could save her if I was locked up in Dade County Penitentiary awaiting trial.
    Not that the police would immediately link me to the Joseph Evans who’d taken out the lease on the adjoining property, but once the federal government became involved – and for a case of this magnitude it would – my fingerprints would throw up an interesting connection to certain military records. With my background, my proximity to the scene, my name would raise more than a few eyebrows. There’d be no talk of coincidence. Christ, I’d be lucky if the entire shit storm wasn’t blamed on me.
    Rink shut down his office, and we travelled across country in his Porsche Boxster. The Ford Explorer would have been more comfortable for two big guys, but I’d had to abandon it last night at Miami Beach. Could be that by now the vehicle was in some chop shop in SoBe and I’d never see the SUV again.
    We cut across country and skirted Bartow, then a series of low-lying lakes and open grasslands with the occasional outcropping of pine, ending up at Fort Pierce where we picked up Route 1 south. On our left was a peninsula that hugged the coastline, separated from the mainland by an open stretch of tidal sands.
    Another hour or so would get us to the gated community on Neptune Island.
    We were on our way to confront Bradley Jorgenson.
    The decision had been made to lay all our cards on the table. Speak to Jorgenson. Brush the punk off if he stood in the way of freedom for Marianne, if in fact that was what she wanted.
    I’d begun with the doubts after seeing how she’d clung to him when she thought they were about to die. Her words in response to the killer’s demand that Jorgenson chose who died first.
    ‘Mari,’ Jorgenson had said to her, ‘I’m sorry I dragged you into this, babe.’
    ‘Not … your … fault,’ she’d whispered back.
    At first I hadn’t taken much notice. I was more concerned with what the killer had to