Page 50 of Close Up

All he had to do was find Vivian Brazier and make a phone call. He did not want to think about what might happen after he made that call. It was none of his business.

Chapter 21

Burning Cove

The next day...

Nick spent most of the day on the villa’s patio, immersed in the poems. From time to time he was aware that Vivian was growing restless. Irene Ward came by at noon and invited her to lunch in the hotel dining room. Nick ordered room service. He took a couple of breaks to walk Rex and clear his mind, but for the most part he concentrated on the killer’s words.

The details the FBI and the cops would need to close at least some of the murders were in the lines that Pete had succeeded in deciphering. Names. Dates. Addresses. Motives. Amounts paid.

But the killer’s secrets were buried in the encrypted verses.

... The tide of night rolls in consuming the glorious moments of transcendence.

Once again the hunter is lost in the devouring mist, drowning in it.

The path back to the brilliant, dazzling clarity of dawn appears...

“Nick.”

Vivian’s voice pulled him out of the harrowing poem. He looked up and saw her standing in front of him. She was holding a newspaper in her hands.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Sorry to interrupt you but I thought you should see this. It’s the afternoon edition of theBurning Cove Herald.Take a look at the photo on page two.”

She handed him the paper. He turned to the second page. The photo showed a well-dressed man emerging from the rear of a limo in front of the grand entrance of the Burning Cove Hotel.

“That’s Ripley Fleming,” Vivian said. “According to theHeraldhe checked in earlier today.”

Chapter 22

It was an eerie stillness that awakened her that night. Not silence, not exactly, Vivian decided. More like a sudden, bone-deep awareness.

Nick.

She did not understand how she could be so sure that the feeling was connected to him but she did not question it. Linked to that certainty was a sense of urgency. She did not question that, either.

She opened her eyes to the moonlit shadows of the bedroom and listened closely. The strange sensation of stillness that had aroused her was something of an illusion. If she concentrated she could hear the music of the hotel’s lounge trio. Laughter and voices drifted from the vicinity of the bar. Nothing had changed since she and Nick had gone into their separate bedrooms a couple of hours earlier.

And yet...

Just my imagination. You’ve been under a lot of stress lately. Don’t worry, nothing’s wrong.

Rex would be barking a warning if someone had somehowmanaged to get through the multilayered rings of hotel security protecting the villa.

On the other hand, she was being hunted by a professional killer, an assassin skilled in the art of making it look as if his victims had all died in accidents and of natural causes.

The edgy restlessness became more intense. She had always believed she possessed strong nerves but there were limits to what anyone could handle. In the past year her night work as a freelance photojournalist had exposed her to some grisly, deeply disturbing sights. Not long ago someone had tried to murder her in her own darkroom. Then someone had firebombed her cottage. She was the target of a paid killer.

A woman could take only so much. Given the circumstances it would have been astonishing if her nerveshadn’tbeen affected.

She needed to get up, to move. A medicinal shot of whiskey might help. She remembered seeing a bottle in the liquor cabinet.

Pushing the covers aside, she rose, slipped her feet into a pair of slippers, and reached for her robe. The door of her room was slightly ajar. She had opened it just before getting into bed because she found it comforting to know that Nick was right next door. He had told her that he would leave his door partially open, too, so that Rex could patrol the villa.

She slipped through the doorway. In the dim glow of the wall sconce she saw that Nick’s door was no longer ajar; it stood wide open. The bed was revealed in a shaft of moonlight. Nick was not in it.

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