Blood Pact (McGarvey) Read Online Free Page A

he had begun to get anywhere close to normal. Enough to read a book, see a movie, or watch a sunset over the Gulf of Mexico and not feel guilty about enjoying it.
    Now this senseless thing. Petain had been at war. But the boy and girl at the bike rack were innocents.
    A siren sounded somewhere in the distance and then another. The Vatican or the Spanish government or the so-called Voltaire Society or some fabulous treasure meant nothing to him. All that mattered was finding the people who had killed a boy and a girl. That he would do. Guaranteed.

 
    THREE
     
    Within a half hour the fires had been put out and the bodies of the students had been loaded aboard an ambulance, but it had taken much longer to find anything identifiable as human remains in the totally destroyed Lexus. And by six a crane had loaded the frame and other parts, including the engine block, onto a flatbed truck to be taken to the police garage where it would be examined.
    A skeptical Sarasota police detective who knew something of McGarvey’s background had briefly questioned him. “Any idea what happened here?” he’d asked. His name was Jim Forest, and he looked like a kid, with dark features and a wide smile. But he seemed to be good at what he did and McGarvey had respect for him.
    “Not really. I was getting into my car when the Lexus blew.”
    “Didn’t see anything, talk to anyone?”
    “Saw those two kids get killed, and some people in the admin building cut up with falling glass. But it could have been a lot worse if it had happened a few hours earlier.”
    Forest shrugged. “Trouble does seem to follow you.”
    “Not anymore,” McGarvey said. “I’m retired. Just here teaching kids a little philosophy.”
    The crowd had mostly thinned out by now, and the flatbed truck driver was securing the Lexus’s chassis, leaving only a couple of police cars plus the crime scene investigator’s panel truck. McGarvey, drinking a cup of coffee someone had brought over, leaned against his car.
    “Why do you suppose I have this hunch that whoever was in the Lexus came here to talk to you about something?”
    “Sometimes even good cops get it wrong.”
    Forest shrugged. “Thanks for the compliment, if that’s what it was. But I think you’re lying. And I don’t like it.”
    McGarvey tossed out the rest of his coffee. “Are we finished here?”
    “For now. But let me know if you’re leaving town anytime soon.”
    “Sure,” McGarvey said, and he got into his car.
    “You’re up to something. I can see it in your eyes. It’s a specialty of mine, reading people.”
    “Let me know if you catch the bad guys.”
    “Bad guys?”
    “The ones who planted the explosives in the Lexus. Semtex. You can smell it.”
    *   *   *
    Back at his two-story home on Casey Key, just across the island’s only road from the Gulf and less than a hundred feet up from the Intracoastal Waterway, which ran ten miles or so north to Sarasota Bay and fifty south to Fort Myers, McGarvey got out of the shower, and as he toweled off he padded to the sliding glass doors that looked down at the swimming pool.
    Forest was right, trouble did follow him. Always had. At first because he’d been ordered to do things, but in the past several years it was because his reputation had caught up with him.
    Wrapping the towel around his middle, he went downstairs, where at the wet bar in the family room he poured a snifter of Remy Martin XO, and walked to his study, where he powered up his computer and phoned Otto Rencke on encrypted Skype.
    The two of them had a long history together, all the way back to a couple of operations in Germany and Chile in the early days when Rencke was nothing more than an archivist for the Company. But since then they’d become close personal friends. Otto, who was a genius and an odd duck, had married Louise Horn, almost as brilliant and odd as her husband. When McGarvey’s daughter and son-in-law were assassinated leaving Audrey, their