Page 107 of A Step You Shouldn't Take

“How did you arrive so fast, anyway?” I asked in an attempt to keep my mind off manual strangulation. “Didn’t you have to get a visa to enter the US?”

“I took Rania for a break in New York a couple of months back, and the visa from that was still valid.”

“New York?” I recalled what Kim had said about visiting the site of the former Twin Towers. “You didn’t go near ground zero, did you?”

“No way, mate. Steered well clear of that one. At least the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building tend to have suicides rather than murders.”

“And suicides are…okay?”

Rania nodded. “They don’t hang around.”

These rules of the afterlife would take some getting used to, but at that moment, the only thing worse than the prospect of having to plan future vacations around local murder rates was not needing to plan them at all. Where the hell was Kim?

“Any messages yet?”

Will glanced at his phone. “Sorry. Why don’t we get some food while we’re waiting? I’ve got a feeling we’re in for a long few days, and we need to keep our strength up.”

Wyatt paused his pacing to stare incredulously. “You really think I can eat right now?”

I wasn’t hungry either, but I saw Will’s point. “Why don’t we order pizza? You can eat something later if you feel like it.”

The first email from RJ arrived right after the delivery guy from Benny’s Italian, and fuck me, the man had struck gold. RJ, not the pizza dude. Not only did we have a list of all the staff who worked at the embassy and their positions, but he’d also found the registration records for the embassy’s diplomatic plates. The deep-pans with everything went cold as we pored over the lists, cross-referencing what we knew. Twenty-two people in Robert Turner’s department. Eleven Chevrolets on the list, but only three were SUVs. One was allocated to a woman, although she could have lent it out, but…

“Peter Turner? Who the hell is Peter Turner?”

He drove a Chevrolet Suburban registered to the embassy, and he didn’t appear anywhere on the staff list. But with that surname…

“He’s got to be a relative of your friend Robert, surely?” Will said, taking a bite of pizza. “A son?”

“His kids are both too young to drive.” I went back to the embassy website and called up the staff page. “See? Unless… Oh, fuck.” Dread settled in my stomach like a lump of lead. “What if he has an ex? More children?”

A bitter divorce and a new wife would explain why he didn’t want to parade Peter around in public. And if they were related, it also explained why the ambassador was being so cagey. A senior staff member’s son killing women around DC under the cover of diplomatic immunity wouldn’t look good on TV, would it?

And I’d missed it. I’d fucking missed it, and now Kim had paid the price.

“We’ll find out.” Will’s distance from the case allowed him to remain calm and dispassionate while Wyatt and I climbed the damn walls. “RJ?” he said into the phone. “Focus on a guy called Peter Turner, and can you find out if he’s any relation to Robert?”

Wyatt began calling people too, everyone from my former colleagues in the police department to informants to contacts in Washington. I’d never felt so helpless—most of my sources came from the streets, not the higher echelons of government, and the chances of them having crossed paths with the embassy staff were slim. Unless…

I dialled Jacob Morgan, an old hack hanging on by his fingernails until retirement. Yes, he had a slight drinking problem, but he’d been around the political scene forever, selling salacious gossip to the highest bidder, and more importantly, he owed me a favour.

“Jake? It’s Reed Cullen.”

“Thought you were dead.”

“I could say the same about you.”

The old man chuckled, then went into a coughing fit bad enough to bring up not only his lungs, but most of his internal organs too. Did I mention he was also a chain-smoker?

“What d’ya want, Cullen? You never call to shoot the damn breeze.”

“Peter Turner. Do you know anything about him?”

“Who?”

“Related to Robert Turner, big shot at the British Embassy?”

“Oh,him. Nobody talks about Petey-boy anymore, not least his father.”

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