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“Grigori..Grigori.” Bert searched his memory. “Potemkin?”
“I was only a duchess at the time. Catherine snapped her fingers and he was at her side with my necklace. She was the empress after all.” Amanda whirled and looked at the faces of the men. “What? It’s not like she’s using it anymore!”
Nick opened his mouth and then closed it. “Bert, do you think the security job was a hoax to bring us here?”
Bert checked his cell phone and computer for missed messages. “You could be right. You’d think they would have contacted me for missing the meeting yesterday. Let me try my contact.” He punched in the number on his phone and held it to his ear, do-do-doing the theme to the Twilight Zone. He stopped and listened, then slowly lowered the phone. “Out of service. We were set up.” He tapped the phone on his chin, thinking.
“Good, then you wouldn’t mind if I...,” Amanda said, arching her eyebrows.
“Yes, I would mind,” said Nick darkly.
“We have other more pressing business,” hurried Bert to say, hoping to forestall another round between the two immortals. “Nick, you work on this number and see if you can find anything. Amanda, keep working on the blood sample, and see if you can find out when Lucy arrived in town, and what she did and who she saw. I’m going over to your place and poke around. I’ll bring you back your suitcases. Anything else?”
“Before you go, tell me what I did the last time you saw me,” Nick asked.
“As I said, we left Tangiers and flew here via London. You told me that you were going to go visit Lucy for lunch. When you didn’t show up on time, I got worried. You always show up for a job.”
“How did I know Lucy was in town?” Nick asked.
“You told me she was, so I assume she phoned you, or you phoned her to check. Can you look at your phone record?”
“Good idea, but I don’t know where my phone is. It wasn’t with the rest of my stuff.”
“I’ll look for it too just in case the cops didn’t find it,” said Bert accepting the list Amanda had been making while the men talked. “In the meantime, you could access your records on line.”
“I’ll do it blindly. It might set off alarms if a dead guy started asking about his phone records. Don’t worry, Bert, I know how and what to do.”
Amanda looked up. “Do you have your sword, Nick?” True actress that she was, she asked this with complete innocence.
“Yeah it’s here.”
“So you didn’t take it with you when you went to visit Lucy?”
“I guess not. Strange. I always take my sword.”
“Just in case?” asked Bert.
“Yeah, just in case,” answered Amanda and Nick together.
“How many have you beheaded?” asked Bert.
“I don’t keep track,” answered Amanda. “It’s a necessity to stay alive, but I don’t like to dwell on it. Our Nick here is special though; he took two heads before he became immortal. You remember Kenworthy, don’t you?”
Bert thought. “The killer after that newspaper heiress?”
“That’s the one. He had been killing the best of each generation since a member of that family killed his adopted son. Nick, here, got him with a pane of glass.” She smiled proudly as if Nick were a beloved child.
“It was an accident,” muttered Nick.
Amanda continued, undeterred, but her voice softened. “Heller wasn’t an accident.”
“Heller killed Lauren and thousands of others. You tried and failed.” Nick said with finality. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Bert got up and put a hand on his friend’s shoulder, his face thoughtful. “Guess it’s not all good, huh? You see a lot of folks get old and die, or just die.” He paused, then said, “Let’s find Lucy’s killer. I’ll keep in touch.” He accepted Amanda’s list and went up the stairs two at a time.
***
Bert hit the buttons for the private elevator. When the doors slid shut, he looked around searchingly, hoping to find something, anything to help the case.
The air of the penthouse was stale and hushed. Blood still stained the carpet, fingerprint powder dusted many surfaces and discarded furniture covers drooped onto the floor. “A hundred years,” murmured Bert, looking around with wiser eyes. He longed to peruse the books on the shelves, the paintings, the artwork, thinking Amanda’s was probably equivalent to any museum exhibit, but remembered that he had a mission.
He started in Lucy’s room. Bold colors on the walls and in the closet but what interested him the most were the two suitcases, only partially unpacked. The tags indicated that Lucy had flown in from Cleveland the day before Nick had supposedly arranged to come and visit her. He wondered who had phoned whom. Her bed had the slightly mussed look which indicated that Lucy had spent at least one night there. In her bathroom, he handled the Oil of Olay and makeup bottles. A half-full bottle of Lipitor was the only prescription medication besides some over the counter pain medications. Nothing unusual.
Amanda’s bed had been stripped, no doubt for forensic testing. On his hands and knees, Bert crawled around, hoping to find something that had been missed. The afternoon sun glinted on the metal casing of Nick’s phone, half hidden beneath the skirt of the chair in front of the opulent vanity. Donning latex gloves, Bert opened the phone and turned it on. He clicked on a few buttons, scanning through the numbers. Finally, he deposited the phone into an evidence bag, placing it in his inside jacket pocket, hoping for finger prints other than the bloody ones he assumed were Nick’s.
Further searching yielded nothing. Quickly filling the suitcases with the additional items on Amanda’s list, Bert thought that maybe Amanda would allow him to use it as another safe house, if he asked nicely.
The soft creak of a door opening alerted him. Silently he put down the bags and moved to the double doors leading from the bedroom to the living area. Standing to the right of the doors, he managed to see a dark shape coming through the large front door. Tall, dark longish hair, and well built, the man strode confidently through the dining area towards the doors behind which Bert hid.
Bert slid back, picking up the bags and retreating to Amanda’s walk-in closet, almost closing the door behind him. He watched though the crack he had left as the man searched the room, looking under the bed, behind the doors, and beneath the other furniture in the room. He did not look through drawers or other hiding places.
Strange behavior for a thief, thought Bert. He must be looking for something. The man approached the closet door as Bert shrank back farther, but there was no exit. He reached for his gun as the man opened the door, but the man was fast. Slapping the gun out of his hand, he followed with a solid punch to the jaw. Bert sank to the floor, blurry lights swirling before his eyes. As if to make certain, the man took Bert’s gun and thunked him on the head with it. Bert’s world went black.
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