Beach Road by James Patterson Page B

third time through that Dante recalls smelling a cigar.
Okay, that could be something.
    And in the midst of his fourth pass, he sits up straight in his chair and says, “There was a guy on the bench.”
    My posture suddenly improves too. “Someone was there?”
    “You know that bench at the far side of the court? A guy was sleeping on it when we arrived. And five minutes later, when we ran past it, he was gone.”
    “You sure about that, Dante? This is important.”
    “Positive. Hispanic-looking dude, Mexican, or maybe Colombian. About thirty, long black hair in a ponytail.”

Chapter 44
    Tom
    A CIGAR. MAYBE belonging to one of the killers.
    The news that somebody else may have been at the murder scene who could confirm or add to Dante’s story, who maybe saw the three kids killed.
    Both are significant leads that need to be tracked down, but there’s something else I need to do first. So the next morning, when the doors of the shuttle slide open in Times Square, I’m one of the five hundred or so suckers ready to go to war for four hundred spaces.
    The same quick first step that got me to the NBA gets me onto the car, and as the subway lurches the quarter mile to Grand Central, I feel as full of purpose and anxiety as any other working stiff in New York. I’m a workingman now. Why shouldn’t I be a commuter too? Jeez, I’m even wearing a suit. And it’s neatly pressed.
    At the other end of the line, the urgent scramble resumes, this time upward toward Forty-second Street. I drop a dollar in the purple lining of an open trumpet case and head east until I’m standing in front of the marble facade of 461 Third Avenue, the suitably impressive home of one of New York’s most venerable white-shoe law firms—Walmark, Reid and Blundell.
    Before I have a chance to lose my nerve, I push through the gleaming brass doors and catch an elevator to the thirty-seventh floor.
    But that just gets me to the
wrong side
of another barrier, as daunting in its way as the walls that ring the Riverhead jail. Instead of barbed wire and concrete, it’s a giant piece of polished mahogany so immense it must have arrived from the rain forest in the hold of a tanker and been hoisted to its new, unlikely home by a cloud-scraping crane.
    Instead of an armed sentry, there’s a stunning blond receptionist wearing a headset and looking like a cyborg.
    “Good morning. I’m here to see Kate Costello,” I say.
    “Do you have an appointment?”
    “No.”
    “Is she expecting you?”
    “I’m a friend.”
    To the receptionist, that’s the same as a no. Maybe worse. She directs me toward a leather purgatory, where for the next twenty minutes I sweat into a thirty-thousand-dollar couch. Last night, coming here unannounced seemed a stroke of genius, and during the three-and-a-half-hour train ride from Montauk, my confidence never flagged. Well, not too much anyway.
    But witty conversations with yourself and mock rehearsals can never duplicate the tension of the actual moment—and now Kate strides toward me, low heels clicking like little hammers on the marble floor.
    I wonder if she knows how little her austere navy suit does to conceal her beauty. And does she care?
    “What are you doing here?” she asks, and before I say a word, I’m back at the bottom of the hole I dug with Kate ten years ago.
    “I need your help to defend Dante Halleyville.”
    This is the point where I figured Kate would invite me back to her office, but all she does is stare through me. So I make my pitch right there in the lobby, laying it out as succinctly as I can. What I say makes perfect sense to me, but I have no idea how it’s being received. I stare into Kate’s bright blue eyes but can’t read them, and when I stop to catch my breath, she cuts me off.
    “Tom,” she says, “don’t ever come here again.”
    Then she spins and walks down the hall, the clicking of her heels sounding even chillier than when she arrived. She never looks back.

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