The Shop

  The Shop

  J. Carson Black

  In Aspen, Colorado, a pop star and her entourage are brutally murdered in their luxury chalet. The lead assassin, ex-Navy SEAL Cyril Landry, has no qualms about carrying out his mission until the instant before he kills the young star—an intense, shared moment that will ultimately drive him to find out why these people had to die. Landry transforms from mercenary to hunter as he delves into the depths of The Shop, the shadowy organization that has hired him to execute people across the country.

  Thousands of miles away, in a seedy motel in Gardenia, Florida, a local police chief is found shot to death. The scene has all the signs of a romantic rendezvous gone wrong, but Detective Jolie Burke isn’t so sure. As she digs for clues, the tangled threads of evidence lead to a disturbing place: Indigo, the lush tropical estate of the powerful Haddox clan and home of US Attorney General Franklin Haddox. As Jolie continues to pursue the truth, she quickly discovers that Haddox will do anything to protect his country’s ugly secrets—even kill.

  Landry’s quest to uncover The Shop’s motives throws him into the dark currents of Jolie’s investigation, and they find themselves working together as an unlikely duo: a cop and a killer, joining forces to expose a shocking conspiracy that ascends to the highest offices in the land.

  Intricate and fast-paced,The Shop is a breathtaking thriller in the vein of Nelson DeMille and David Baldacci.

  THE SHOP J. CARSON BLACK

  To John Lescroart, for helping me become a better writer. You are the class of any field.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  It takes a village to raise a book. Many thanks to my agent, Deborah Schneider, and to Courtney Miller and Charlotte Herscher for making this the best book it can be.

  For your practical help, support and encouragement: Chris and Marcelino Acevedo of Clues Unlimited; Maynard Allington; Lori G. Armstrong; John Cheek; John Garrett; Alison Gaylin; Liam Hopper; Carol Jose; John Lescroart, Lee Lofland; Carol Davis Luce; Donald Maass; Daniel Piel; George, Cliff, Barb, and Daniel McCreedy; Michael Prescott; Diana Ross; Don and Rose Shepperd; Lynn Spencer, Karin Tabke; Bonnie Toews and Elaine Walsh. To Barbara Schiller, Darrell Harvey, Janice Jarrett, Robin Williams, Solange Jarrett-Williams, Edie Laude, Jennifer Jarrett, Celia and Dale Halstead, and Lafayette and Beth Barr. Thanks also to Southwest Crime Ink: Elizabeth Gunn, J.M. Hayes, and Susan Cummins Miller.

  Special thanks to William Simon, a.k.a. The Caped Crusader. Without you, this book could not have been written.

  Once again, as always, thanks to my mother, Mary Falk, and my husband (and partner in crime), Glenn McCreedy.

  PROLOGUE

  MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND

  ASPEN, COLORADO

  Landry thought: The kid’s positively giddy.

  Landry had been getting comfortable with the night, watching from the woods as the party wound down at the house on Castle Creek Road, people getting into their expensive cars and driving away, leaving just the core group.

  Shortly after, the young man came out and made his unsteady way to the deck railing. He had spiky hair and a scarecrow frame. He looked down at the rushing water, then up at the stars. Landry could see his smile even from where he was. The kid’s skinny arms hugged his body, as if he couldn’t quite believe his good fortune. Tipsy—more than tipsy, inebriated—but something had delighted him, thrilled him. Something had gone very right for him today.

  The young man twirled around, looking at the stars. Mesmerized by them. He could have been the leading man in his own musical—the wonderful story of his life. He could barely contain his joy. He had less than an hour to live.

  As they reached the walkway, Landry said, “Gloves and masks from now on.”

  They split up. Jackson would go in first, through the back door. Landry and Davis would go in the front. Green would remain outside; he was surveillance only.

  They waited for Jackson to report in. “Upstairs clear.”

  “How many?”

  “Two. The couple. They were laying in bed.”

  “Lying,” Landry said.

  “What?”

  “Lying in bed. Not laying.”

  A pause. Then, “Roger that.”

  Davis opened the front door in one smooth, quick motion, and they stepped inside.

  The lights were on. Landry saw the expensive furnishings and enormous stone fireplace, cataloging these things briefly before dismissing them. His eye was on the four targets. Three of them were sleeping: a male and female entwined on a zebra skin near the fireplace and a young woman crashed out on the couch. The fourth was in the process of walking unsteadily toward the kitchen. He was the kid Landry had seen twirling under the stars. A lot worse for wear. He’d done some steady imbibing, or toking, or snorting, since last Landry saw him on the deck.

  The kid looked at them. His eyes had difficulty tracking. He said, “You should’ve come earlier, there was a lot more food.”

  Landry fell into step with the kid and put an arm around his shoulder, casually pulling him around so he held him from behind. He slit the kid’s throat and dropped him like a sack of grain. Dead in eight seconds.

  Davis finished dispatching the couple as Landry turned his attention to the sleeper, who was half-sitting, half-lying, her head resting against the couch back. Some sixth sense must have awakened her because she cocked her head upward, her eyes bewildered.

  Startled.

  He’d seen her before. It came to him—Brienne Cross. One of those celebrities in the news all the time. His daughter had a poster of her up in her room.

  He hesitated just long enough for alarm to dawn in her eyes, which dismayed him. He touched a finger to his lips, letting her know it was all right, and pulled her up toward him with one hand. He drew his knife across her throat with the other.

  Her mouth went slack. The light in her eyes died. He let her back down on the couch, gently.

  “Four here,” he said into the radio. Thinking: Brienne Cross.

  Jackson joined them. There were six people dead. All in all the operation had taken fewer than five minutes.

  Landry looked at Jackson. Jackson shifted his feet, then started back toward the stairway. His reluctance was clear. He might not do a convincing job.

  Landry said, “I’ll do it.”

  The couple lay in bed, naked above the sheets. They looked peaceful despite their slashed throats. Landry crossed himself, trying to think of what he did next as gutting a deer. They were dead; they would feel nothing. But their mutilation bothered him.

  Done, he glanced around the room, which now resembled an abattoir. His regret at the desecration of these young people was eclipsed by the satisfaction of a job accomplished with flawless precision. It had taken him three and a half minutes, including painting the two eights on the mirror with the woman’s blood.

  As he started down the stairs, Landry thought about the girl on the couch, the look in her eyes: frightened, then trusting, and finally, empty.

  His daughter wanted to grow up to be Brienne Cross.

  They were almost out of there. One last check of the perimeter and—

  Then he heard sirens. They were a long way off but coming fast.

  Simultaneously, Green’s voice crackled in his ear.

  “Police heading this way.”

  “Where?”

  “Up from the valley. Two units.”

  “We’re out of here.”

  Landry turned off the lights and slipped out the back door. The sirens screaming in the night now. His mind ranging far ahead as he tried to make sense of this. He wasn’t worried about escaping. What worried him was something else.

  Who had betrayed them?

  He melted into the woods, found a suitable vantage point, and stretched out, stomach-down, on the ground.
Relied on his training to make himself part of the forest.

  Cataloging faces, phone calls, names. Who?

  The lights burst through the trees below, blinking white, red, and blue. Engines straining. In his mind’s eye he saw them swerving in at the house, slamming into park—

  But that did not happen.

  The cars did not slow. They rocketed past, two Pitkin County Sheriff’s cars.

  It was okay.

  No one had betrayed them.

  As the sirens receded, he spoke into his radio. “Wait where you are until I give the signal.”

  1 MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND

  NICK

  It came to Nick Holloway, gradually, that he was lying on cold hard concrete. Something above held him fast. His shirt was hooked on the undercarriage of a car.

  He managed to get loose, tearing his shirt in the process, and crawled out from under. Enveloped by the stench of motor oil, shaking and sick, Nick finally realized where he was: the two-car garage beneath the Aspen house.

  The last thing he remembered was talking to a guy named Mars at the Soul Mate wrap party. He’d never seen Mars before. It was an exclusive wrap party—just Brienne Cross, the contestants and their guests, himself, and the crew. But Nick remembered talking to the mysterious Mars, the two of them sitting on the back deck, the movement of Castle Creek rushing underneath the slats making him dizzy.

  After that it was lights-out.

  Nick pulled himself to his feet. His legs didn’t work very well, and the smell of flowers and cut lawn sickened him. He became aware of the bright yellow ribbon stretched across the entrance to the garage. Written on the tape were the words “CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS.”

  A policeman behind the tape stared in at him, mouth open in shock. Then he started yelling.

  A Pitkin County Sheriff’s detective with long legs, big shoes, and a face like a hatchet put him in the front seat of a brown Chevy Caprice, exactly the kind of car Nick had described in his thriller, Hype.

  “Do you have some ID?” the detective said.

  Nick had a question of his own. “Do you know how I ended up in the garage?”

  “I thought maybe you could tell me that.”

  Nick realized that he had to stare at the air conditioner vent in the cracked dash to avoid spinning. “I have no idea.”

  “ID,” the detective reminded him quietly.

  Nick shifted to pull his wallet out of his back pocket and nearly passed out. He stared at the vent until the double vision stopped. “Jesus.”

  Hatchet Face took the wallet and looked at his driver’s license. “Nick Holloway. I’ve heard that name before.”

  “Maybe it was my book, Hype. Number thirteen on the New York Times Best Seller list.”

  “I don’t read. The wife does, though. It’s not about vampires, is it? She loves that stuff.” Hatchet Face had his license out and was tapping it against his leg. “Did you know the people in the house?”

  Nick noticed the past tense. He wondered if the cast and crew had blackballed him, but that seemed silly. The aspirin taste seeped into his mouth again—he was going to be sick.

  “Mr. Holloway.”

  But Nick had already passed out.

  They resumed the interview in the emergency room. They had plenty of privacy. It had been two hours, and a nurse had poked her head through the curtain once, ducking out instantly in case anyone asked her for anything. Nick lay in a surgical gown on the crank-abed. Hatchet Face, Detective Derek Sloan, sat on a plastic chair.

  “You mean they’re all dead? Brienne? Justin? All of them?”

  Nick wasn’t quite able to grasp it, but he knew it was huge. Logically, he understood that he had just escaped death, but in his current state, he was unable to assimilate it.

  Sloan switched his ankle from one knee to the other. “You have any idea how you came to be in the garage?”

  “Nope.” Nick told the story again: He remembered talking to Mars on the deck. Feeling pretty good. Then looking down at the rushing water between the slats of the deck, feeling sick. “I think I was looking for a bathroom.”

  “That’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Until I woke up under an oil pan.”

  “You were writing an article for Vanity Fair?”

  “A series, actually. ‘The Reality Show Diaries.’ Not my choice for a title. I was thinking more along the lines of ‘Sucking Up for Fun and Profit.’” Once again it hit home that all of them had been killed. If he hadn’t been in the garage, he would have been killed, too.

  The detective questioned him about his presence in the garage at length, and also asked if he knew of anyone who would want to kill everyone in the house. He mentioned white supremacists.

  The room began to spin again.

  Somebody in blue scrubs bustled in and told Sloan to leave.

  2 SIX WEEKS LATER

  JOLIE

  NORTH FLORIDA

  The pond behind Jolie Burke’s house was about two-thirds the length of a backyard swimming pool. She figured it would take her eight strokes to reach the opposite bank.

  During the day, the pond was opaque. The shadows were deep and almost impossible to look into. Little bubbles spiraled up near the bank where decaying vegetation and cypress trees met.

  Never once had she contemplated swimming in it.

  That had changed this morning, when Jolie looked at the pond from her yard.

  One minute it was a normal day, close and sticky, the sun hot on the top of her head. Her mind was still on her parents’ first home, which she’d walked through the day before.

  Then the feeling came up, fast, and gripped her hard. Her heart pounded. Her hands and feet went numb. She couldn’t get her breath.

  Jolie knew it was the pond.

  She forced herself to move, to turn around and walk back into the house. The feeling of doom followed her into the kitchen. She sat down on a chair at the kitchen table.

  She sat in the chair for maybe half an hour. Time seemed to expand. The clock ticked loudly. Her cat, Rex, begged for his food, but she couldn’t stand up to give it to him.

  Finally, legs shaking, she rose to her feet and fed the cat, then went to the bedroom and put on the clothes she’d laid out the night before. She left the house and got into the car. By the time she drove into the parking lot at the Palm County Sheriff’s Office, Detective Jolie Burke felt almost normal.

  After dinner, she walked out onto the screened-in porch and looked in the direction of the pond. The trees were black against the sky. Between the trunks, she could see the faint glimmer where a slice of moon was reflected in the water.

  Jolie made the decision then. She went back to the bedroom and pulled on her swimsuit, nosed her feet into her flip-flops, grabbed a towel from the linen closet, and slapped down the path and through the gate to the pond’s edge. We’re going to fix this thing once and for all.

  The moment she hit the path, the feeling started to build.

  By the time she reached the bank, there was thunder in her ears. Her heart pounded.

  Then the chasm started to open up beneath her feet.

  Ignore it.

  She stepped up to the edge of the pond. The world seemed to slither from view. Her legs shook. She dug her toes into the damp earth. Whether this would result in a dive or keep her chained to the ground, Jolie wasn’t sure. Just then, the phone rang inside the house.

  It startled her so much, she almost sat down. Instead, she sprinted for the back door, thinking: I’ll be back later, and we’ll finish this.

  The person on the phone was Lonnie Crenshaw, the Palm County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher.

  “We have a report of shots fired at the Starliner Motel in Gardenia, and at least one gunshot victim. The victim is deceased. Can you take this?”

  “Sure.”

  Jolie held on to the phone with one hand and stripped out of her swimsuit with the other. She walked to the closet and eyed blouses and slacks on a row of hangers. Gratefu
l for the distraction. She would put the other stuff—the terrifying notion that this weird phobia was here to stay—out of her mind. “What’s the situation? We’re backup for the Gardenia PD?”

  “Negative. They’re asking for one of ours to work the case.” There was a pause. “The deceased is Jim Akers.”

  “Chief Akers?”

  “That’s right. Are you sure you want to take this?”

  It took a moment for the magnitude of the situation to sink in. Adrenaline surged as she realized both the opportunity this presented and the possible pitfalls.

  “You want Louis to take it?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll get there as soon as I can. Who’s there?”

  “Gardenia PD. We have two units of our own on the way.”

  “Tell them to stay out of my scene.”

  3

  Gardenia lay twenty-three miles inland from Meridian Beach, on a straight two-lane highway running through flatwood forests, scrubland, and cypress sloughs.

  The Starliner Motel was a gray cinder block building with turquoise doors. The office jutted out toward the street. Ten units stretched off to the right. An oleander hedge ran alongside the motel, paralleling the railroad tracks. The oleander’s leaves looked yellow. Maybe it was from the glow of the sodium arc light above, or it could be due to the sulfurous pall cast by the Gardenia paper mill.

  A little over a month ago, two people died here. Now there was another death.

  Room nine was the second-to-last unit on the end. In addition to the sheriff’s and Gardenia PD units parked out front, Jolie spotted the chief’s navy Crown Vic parked nose-in to the room. A Gardenia PD officer stood just outside the open door to the room. His job was to keep unauthorized people out of the scene. He took it seriously—Horatius at the Bridge.

  Jolie put on gloves and booties, took out her camera, and walked past the deputies, giving them a friendly nod. She tried not to be distracted by the smells coming from the room: gunpowder and the stench of meat left out too long.