Page 307 of Affair
“I was the last one to know he was dead. They told my father, and I believe he arranged for the locker to be handled. I didn’t know Hemmingway had died until about a week after his death when my father showed up here.”
Fuck.
Von didn’t look happy.
Oh, and that was perfect.
“So the only person who could answer that would be my father. I will say that when I went back to the UK, I never saw one on the estate.”
They both knew what Von was thinking. They’d killed the man, and now, the footlocker was MIA.
Von stared him in the eyes.
“Are you lying to me?” he asked.
Poe looked insulted.
“Why would I lie? Why would I waste my time? I know my fate. You’re going to just kill me anyway.”
Von measured the man in front of him. The stuffy doctor didn’t appear to be lying to him.
It looked like Von had to send his men back there to look for a goddamn footlocker. Now, he was hella pissed that they’d killed the Duke of Gordon.
“Anything else of your brother’s things here?” he asked.
Poe looked around.
“Not that I know. His things were emptied into this box and shipped home. The only thing that could be left would be the footlocker,” he said, showing him the postal markings on the actual box.
Von could see that they were addressed from Afghanistan and the base he’d been on.
“This sat at my parent’s house until I showed up there. I just brought it home with me so I could have a piece of Hemmingway.”
Von was suspicious.
“Why are you helping?” he asked.
He thought about the three men holding Gamble at knife point.
“I’m a man of my word,” he admitted. “Your men said the Marine I was with, and who had nothing to do with this, wouldn’t be killed if I helped. I’m trusting you to be a man of yours.”
Von said nothing.
He was feeling magnanimous to this man. He was, after all, a fellow countryman.
“This is what I have,” he admitted, putting a sword on top of the box, and even putting some of his own things in there tohelp himself. If he killed him, maybe the police would find his things and link his death to this piece of shit.
Didn’t DNA matter?
Didn’t Elizabeth Blackhawk solve murders?
When they heard running up the stairs, Von pulled a gun and pointed it at Poe.
He gasped and dropped the box when the gun was inches from his face.
One of his men peeked his head into the room.
“Sir, there’s a helicopter coming in. You gotta go,” he stated.
