Page 158 of Gone Before Goodbye

“Even if I’ll have to look over my shoulder.”

“It was the right call.”

“What else could I do?”

No need to answer that. Porkchop had pointed the gun at Nadia, his finger twitching on the trigger, his face twisted in anguish. But he didn’t pull the trigger. Instead, he muttered, “It stays with you,” and told Nadia to go.

“What made you check my passport?” he asks.

“Your clothes were already in your room, and then Florence asked you if you’d been enjoying your stay—even though we just arrived. Why would she ask that? Then I looked at the flight schedules. There was nothing from JFK to Dubai stopping in London until later in the day. So I started thinking about it. After I called Trace to come home, he broke into Apollo Longevity. He wouldn’t do that just to get phenobarbital and clonazepam. He stole the THUMPR7 and the assisting equipment. Those would be his get-out-of-jail-free card. My guess is, he planned to put it in the Wells Fargo bank. But he never got the chance because, well, you killed him. That meansyouhad the THUMPR7. How am I doing so far?”

“Pretty well.”

“So what was the deal you made, Porkchop?”

“I contacted Ivan Brovski via Barlow. I told him I had the artificial heart they’d been looking for. I would bring it to him. I would get you to France and help convince you to do the surgery. In return, they would pay us an extravagant amount of money and promise to leave us alone. That was the key—you and I would be out. I already knew who killed Marc. I already knew what happened to Trace—”

“But I didn’t.”

“You knew enough.”

“No, sorry, you don’t have the right to make that decision for me.”

“I was trying to protect you.”

“Yeah, look how well that worked out for Marc.”

Porkchop winces. “I know. I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

“No more secrets.”

“No more secrets,” Porkchop says.

There is something troubling in his tone.

“You have more?”

He gestures at her with his chin. “Why don’t you go first?”

Maggie says nothing.

“Do you want to tell me about your father’s gun, Maggie?”

Everything goes still, as if the very room were holding its breath.

Porkchop takes a step toward her. “You went down into your basement. That’s where your father hid his old thirty-eight. Sharon saw you. She was worried, so she called me.” He tilts his head. “What were you planning on doing with his gun?”

She says nothing.

“Trace was supposed to show up the next day. He killed Marc—and he was going to get away with it. You knew that. So tell me, Maggie, what did you plan on doing with your father’s thirty-eight?”

Tears run down her cheeks.

“When you kill a man,” Porkchop says, “it stays with you.”

“It stays with you…”

“And,” Maggie says, “you didn’t want that for me.”