Page 121 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

“They’ll … won’t I leave fingerprints on her?”

Joanna closed her eyes briefly in irritation. “Why would younotcheck to see if someone who’d been stabbed was alive or dead? Wouldn’t everybody do that? If your printsweren’tthere, that would be suspicious.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

He bent down over the woman, pressed his fingers on her neck. “There’s no pulse.”

“Check her eyes.”

He hesitated.

“It’s not a horror movie, Marty. She’s not going to possess you with her gaze.”

He grimaced at the verbal slap and nervously rubbed his hands together then lifted the woman’s lids.

“I don’t know … It … Yeah, I guess she’s gone.”

Whittaker whispered, “Jo, please … What are you doing?”

The woman turned disappointed eyes upon him. “It’s reckoning time, Averell.”

“What?” He winced.

“For one, stealing the company from my father …”

Whittaker snapped, “Your father was a drunk! He pledged shares for loans to cover his bad investments. Illegally. It took two years to get that nullified. I gave him a generous allowance.”

“He was humiliated.”

Whittaker muttered, “He made his bed. Some would’ve cut him off completely.”

“And dissolving the company? Everything Father worked for?”

“We wrote stories that cost lives. I can’t be a part of that anymore.”

He looked away, as Joanna continued, “Your foundation’s a joke. Nobody cares about the press, about news, about facts.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is, yes.”

“I wasn’t going to dissolve your charity.”

Her face flared with rage. “Where you can count on your little niece to keep her head down and not get into any trouble.”

He looked at his son. “What’s wrong with him? What’ve you done?”

“He’s drugged.”

“We’ll work something out. Please …”

Her stern face, with the fleshy nose and thick eyebrows, gazed at him with what might perhaps be a modicum of sadness.

Then he thought of the security guard and knew there’d be no negotiation.

He saw the scene unfolding. They would kill him, using the same knife, then Kitt—probably injecting him with more drugs, an overdose. It would look like a suicide. The empire would go to Joanna.

“You’ll keep the company running,” he whispered.

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