Free The Chase: A Novel by Brenda Joyce Page A

now.
    She was going to skip the call, but instead, she straightened and picked it up.
    “Claire!” Geraldine cried. “I’ve got it! I found a number for Ian Marshall in New York City. Are you ready?”
    Claire had stiffened and was completely alert now. “What did you find out?” she asked warily. She knew an ax was about to fall. She could feel it as if her own head were right there on the chopping block.
    “Ian Marshall is a director of an unusual organization, Claire. It’s called the Bergman Holocaust Research Center. Mostly it’s an educational group, privately endowed. He has a good reputation, and an M.A. in European history and a Ph.D. in Holocaust studies, the former from Oxford, the latter from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.”
    “I don’t get it,” Claire said uneasily. But she kept thinking about the thumb knife that had killed both David and someone named George Suttill. A weapon used in World War II. Marshall seemed very involved in World War II. “What does this guy do? And how could he have been involved with David?”
    “I have no idea why he and David were involved. His exact title is director of special investigations, Claire,” Geraldine said with excitement. “No one at the BHRC will discuss current and ongoing investigations, so they won’t really discuss him.”
    “Special investigations?” Claire echoed. Her pulse was drumming. “Special investigations of what?”
    “War crimes,” she replied.
    Claire stared through the windshield at her house without really seeing it. It took her a moment to comprehend Geraldine. “He’s a Nazi hunter?” she asked incredulously.
    “It seems that way.”
    Claire stared, but all she saw now was David sitting in the lawn chair on the terrace, his throat slit, his torso covered with blood—and all she could think was that the killer had used a thumb knife, a weapon used by Nazi agents over fifty years ago.
    Claire somehow said good-bye and hung up. It took her only a second to lift the receiver again and dial the number she had scrawled on a pad. She did not know what she was going to say, and as she had seen him only yesterday at David’s funeral, she did not even know if he was back in New York yet.
    Her message sounded breathless to her own ears. “Ian, this is Claire Hayden. I’m sorry about our abrupt conversation the other day. I must speak with you again. It’s urgent. Thanks.” Claire left her numbers and hung up.
    She was shaking. She was insane. He was a Nazi hunter, which made him an expert on Nazis, and maybe, just maybe, a killer from those days was on the loose. A killer . . . or a copycat. And that would explain why he had so suddenly appeared in their lives, if he was somehow involved in what was going on. But involved how? If he knew something that she did not, he was going to cough it up. But why hadn’t he been honest with her from the start? If he was investigating this killer, then why hadn’t he said so?
    She could not know that thousands of miles away in a sunlit corner room in a brand-new building on the east side of Manhattan, Ian Marshall sat at his desk, listening to her message, his hands bridged in front of his face.
    And when he moved them, it wasn’t to reach for the phone, it was to turn a photograph on his desk more fully toward him.
    It was a color photo of a young man with dark hair who looked remarkably like Marshall. The man was wearing a beaten-up bomber jacket, jeans, and scuffed Frye boots, and he was smiling at the camera, squinting against the sun. He was standing in front of a World War II fighter plane with the Royal Air Force insignia, but the man’s long sideburns and shoulder-length hair earmarked the picture as dating to the early seventies and not the war. Marshall stared at the photograph for another moment, and then he turned it away.
    He did not return Claire’s call.

CHAPTER 3
    One week later, Claire began the process of moving. She had signed a year lease for a small