Dressed to Kill Read online

  Dressed to Kill

  A Jack Marconi PI Short

  Vincent Zandri

  Contents

  Untitled

  Untitled

  Untitled

  Dressed to Kill

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Untitled

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Untitled

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  PRAISE FOR VINCENT ZANDRI

  “Sensational . . . masterful . . . brilliant.”

  —New York Post

  “(A) chilling tale of obsessive love from Thriller Award–winner Zandri (Moonlight Weeps)…Riveting.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “…Oh, what a story it is…Riveting…A terrific old school thriller.”

  —Booklist “Starred Review”

  “My fear level rose with this Zandri novel like it hasn't done before. Wondering what the killer had in store for Jude and seeing the ending, well, this is one book that will be with me for a long time to come!”

  —Reviews by Molly

  “I very highly recommend this book . . . It's a great crime drama that is full of action and intense suspense, along with some great twists . . . Vincent Zandri has become a huge name and just keeps pouring out one best seller after another.”

  —Life in Review

  “(The Innocent) is a thriller that has depth and substance, wickedness and compassion.”

  —The Times-Union (Albany)

  "The action never wanes."

  —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  "Gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting."

  —Harlan Coben, New York Times bestselling author of Six Years

  "Tough, stylish, heartbreaking."

  —Don Winslow, New York Times bestselling author of Savages and Cartel.

  “A tightly crafted, smart, disturbing, elegantly crafted complex thriller…I dare you to start it and not keep reading.”

  —MJ Rose, New York Times bestselling author of Halo Effect and Closure

  “A classic slice of raw pulp noir…”

  —William Landay, New York Times bestselling author of Defending Jacob

  Other Novels by Vincent Zandri

  The Detonator

  When Shadows Come

  The Remains

  The Concrete Pearl

  Permanence

  The Scream Catcher

  Everything Burns

  Orchard Grove

  The Chase Baker Action/Adventure Series

  The Shroud Key

  Chase Baker and the Golden Condor

  Chase Baker and the God Boy

  Chase Baker and the Lincoln Curse

  Chase Baker and the Da Vinci Divinity

  Chase Baker and the Seventh Seal

  Chase Baker and the Dutch Diamonds

  The Jack Marconi PI Novels

  The Innocent

  Godchild

  The Guilty

  The Corruptions

  The Dick Moonlight PI Novels

  Moonlight Falls

  Moonlight Mafia

  Moonlight Rises

  Blue Moonlight

  Murder by Moonlight

  Moonlight Sonata

  Full Moonlight

  Moonlight Breaks Bad

  Moonlight Weeps

  Dog Day Moonlight

  Dressed to Kill

  A Jack Marconi PI Short

  Vincent Zandri

  Chapter One

  It never failed to amaze me how effortlessly Blood could pump out a dozen chest presses with no less than three forty-five pound plates set on each side of the bar. Adding in the weight of the bar, that made a total of three hundred fifteen pounds.

  Blood already bore a body that looked like it had been sculpted from the richest dark marble ever to be found on the planet, so his workouts were only about maintenance. Unlike me who was always trying to improve my strength and size because, after all, I wasn’t getting any younger and it seemed like these days, someone was always trying to punch me.

  Those punches almost always came from younger men, and all too frequently, bigger men. It was important to keep up with them, or else lose my edge. Plus, I liked working out with Blood. Just about every eye in the joint was peeled on him when he lifted a weight, and since I bore the privilege of being his exclusive spotter, that made me special too. Or so I liked to believe.

  We’d been working out in the Albany Strength Gym on that weekday morning when Val walked in through the front glass doors. Maybe it had something to do with how close we’d been over the past two decades, or how she was never far from my thoughts. Though we’d been broken up for the past year, I knew in my gut it had to be her even before I looked to see who it was.

  My gut was speaking to me.

  It didn’t require seeing her to know that, for the first time in long, long time, the one woman I loved more than any other had just walked through the door, or that what she was about to tell me was not good.

  Lying on my back on the flat bench, I wracked the weights and sat up.

  “Don’t look now,” Blood said from where he stood directly behind me in spotter position. “But your ex-lady just entered the building.”

  “I know,” I said. I meant it.

  Beating heart shooting up into my mouth, I stole a quick glance at her. She was dressed all in black, almost like she was in mourning. But, at the same time, it was a classy if not sexy black outfit of tall leather boots with stiletto heels, stockings, short snug fitting skirt, and turtleneck sweater, a gold necklace balanced itself on her more than ample breasts. Her long, dark hair was parted neatly over her left eye, and when her brown eyes connected with mine, I felt like the biggest jerk in the world for not having picked up the phone even once over the past months. Too many months.

  I stood.

  “Hello, Val,” I said.

  She smiled, looked beyond me to Blood.

  “Hello, Blood,” she said softly.

  All around us sounded the clanking of plates and iron bars being wracked. Beefy men and women grunting and hefting, pushing and pulling, making their bodies stronger, tighter, more confident. But I felt like an absolute drip in my gray sweats and old, somewhat faded Mysterious Bookshop T-shirt, my face not having seen a razor in a few days.

  “Think I gots to use the head,” Blood said. Then, “Good to see you, Val. Stunning as always.” He turned, headed for the locker room.

  That left me alone with the woman whom I’d left standing alone on the altar more than ten years ago now. The woman who’d been my on again/off again for more years than I cared to count. A complicated situation that didn’t have to be so complicated, and that was all my fault. You see, the one woman I’d loved as much as Val had been taken from me by a hit-and-run driver two decades ago, and when I buried her, a part of me went underground along with her.

  I never wanted to go through that pain again.

  So, I kept my distance from Val. Soon as things between us heated up, I always seemed to cool them down by retreating. It made for a lonely life. But I loved Val, and I knew she loved me. The fact that she was standing in front of me
looking sad but beautiful right now meant one thing and one thing only.

  She needed me.

  “Can we talk, Keep?” she said.

  I swallowed something.

  “Sure,” I said.

  It was a gray, mid-winter day and I knew I should grab my coat, especially with a slight sheen of sweat covering my skin. But I didn’t want to leave Val, even for an instant. Here’s the deal. I felt that if I left her for the minute or two it would take to grab my coat in the locker room, she would get cold feet and run away.

  “Let’s just go outside,” I suggested.

  Turning, she went for the gym’s front door.

  I followed close behind. Very, very close.

  Outside, she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her leather purse, placed one in her mouth. When she went to light it, I could see for the first time that her hands were shaking and it wasn’t because of the cold.

  Without asking, I gently took the lighter from her hand. I also reached out and took the cigarette from her lips, placed it between my own.

  “When did you start back up?” I asked, thumbing a flame, cupping my hands around it, lighting the cigarette without inhaling into my lungs.

  “After everything that’s happened at the shop,” she said, “I needed something.”

  I handed her back the cigarette and she took to it like a fish that’s been out of water for way too long. Some people find it impossible to quit a second time after they go back to smoking. But I knew Val wasn’t one of those persons. She would quit again, cold turkey, one day when she was ready. But not before.

  “I heard,” I said. “About the shop.”

  What Val was referring to, and all of Albany had heard about via the city’s numerous media darlings, was the alleged murder of her partner in the small clothing store they’d started late last year. The John Patrick Boutique was a far cry from what Val was used to when she worked for me as my Girl Friday back when I was warden at the Green Haven Maximum Security Penitentiary. Instead of keeping daily records on murderers, rapists, con men, and drug dealers, Val now sold high-end fashions to some of the city’s wealthiest female customers, most of them the suburban, country club, and Botox fed wives of prominent lawyers, judges, and businessmen. I could bet an entire year’s paycheck that not one of Val’s customers was married to a private detective.

  The reason for Val’s emotional state of being was that her partner was found brutally stabbed on the floor of the boutique one late Friday evening almost two weeks ago now. The cash in the till had been wiped out, the jewelry counter emptied, and more than a few pieces of clothing lifted. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear and what had the cop’s baffled, aside from the fact that there were no witnesses to the murder nor any suspects thus far, was that there were no signs of a struggle. It was as though Val’s partner, Anna Kruise, just stood there and allowed the killer to slowly and carefully run a razor sharp blade across her neck. In other words, whoever killed Anna must have known Anna enough for her to trust him. Theoretically speaking that is.

  Val smoked, exhaled the blue smoke into the gray city air.

  “Then you know there are still no suspects,” she said, looking away.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. And I can see that it’s making you upset.”

  She smiled bitterly, suddenly, shook her head, quietly mouthed the word, “Shit.”

  “You know what, Keeper?” she said. “I’m not telling you the whole truth.”

  Confusion filled my head like oxygen to an iron-pumped muscle.

  “Val,” I said, “stop beating around the mulberry bush and tell me what’s going on. What’s made you suddenly show up in my life after six months of radio silence?”

  She smoked some more, and once again, looked out onto the empty downtown Albany concrete jungle.

  “The cops,” she said, “they do actually have a suspect now.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  She looked into my eyes.

  “Me,” she said.

  Chapter Two

  “Wait for me right here,” I said, peering into her now wet eyes, setting both my hands on her shoulders. “I’m gonna grab my stuff.”

  Making my way to the gym door, Val called out for me.

  “Keeper,” she said.

  My hand on the door, I turned to face her.

  “What is it?”

  “Are you going to say something about this to Blood?”

  The world paused for a moment.

  “Blood loves you.”

  “Okay,” is all she said.

  Blood was standing directly in front of the room-length, wall-mounted mirror. He was doing bicep curls with the easy curl bar stacked with forty-five pound plates on each end of the bar. He was lifting the bar one repetition at a time with such ease and grace, I almost suggested he add another ninety pounds, but then thought better of it. Like I said, Blood lifted to maintain his physique these days, not to add even more bulk.

  “You gonna tell me what’s wrong?” he said after completing ten quick reps, “or I gotta beat it out of you?”

  His arms were exposed in a cut-off T-shirt that had a picture of Bruce Lee on it. The bare-chested image captured Bruce in mid-air while he kicked the snot out of some fat Chinese gangster. It was a badass action shot that might have distracted me if not for Blood’s veins which were pulsating and practically popping out of his skin.

  “I’ll give you the short version while you pump,” I said.

  “Thoughtful of you,” he replied.

  I told him what Val told me and I kept it short.

  He racked the bar, shook the oxygenated blood around in his pumped-up arms, inhaled and exhaled a breath.

  “Cops know better than to question a lady like Val,” he said, tone steady, even though I knew he was, at present, angry and getting angrier. Like I said, he loved Val like she was his own daughter.

  “My guess is they gotta be desperate for them to approach her,” I pointed out.

  “Who’s in charge of the investigation?”

  “I’m guessing Nick Miller.”

  “Miller’s a good man. Looks like Clint Eastwood, circa 1971, Dirty Harry.”

  “Miller’s hair is all gray now.”

  “That’s okay. He’s still Clint Eastwood.”

  “I’m going to talk with him now,” I said.

  “What are my marching orders?”

  “Marching orders?”

  “Been expanding my vocabulary lately. I never used the term marching orders before. Now I have. You dig?”

  “Yeah, I dig,” I said. “I assume the strip mall where the John Patrick Boutique is located has an owner who maintains the place and oversees security.”

  “You want me to go there, find out if there’s a CCTV video of the boutique from the night of the murder. Then you want me to examine it and get back to your pronto.”

  “That about sums it up,” I concurred.

  My brother from another mother lifted both arms, struck a double biceps pose that would have made Arnold faint on the spot.

  “Why you gotta do that to me?” I said.

  “Do what?” he said into the mirror.

  “Pose-down your perfect torso like that. It makes me feel infinitely inferior. You know how sensitive I am.”

  “Perfection is in the eye of the beholder.”

  “I guess that makes me a beholder.”

  I started for the locker room to retrieve my stuff, but then something dawned on me.

  “Hey,” I said, about-facing. “If you already knew what I was going to ask you, why’d you make me ask it in the first place?”

  “Told you already,” he said. “I wanted to say marching orders.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said, marching my way to the locker room to grab my coat.

  Chapter Three

  First, I followed Val back to her townhouse in historic downtown Troy so we could park her old Volkswagen Cabriolet. Next, we drove back across the river in my Toyota 4Runner to my plac
e on Sherman Street where I changed into something more befitting of a man who was about to make a surprise visit to the Albany Police Department. That is, a pair of clean Levi button-fly jeans, dark brown cowboy boots, a black T-shirt under a black flannel workshirt, and finally, a brown corduroy blazer large enough to allow room for my Colt .45 Model 1911.

  While I showered and dressed, Val sat quietly in my living room not looking at the television, not reading the old National Geographic and Atlantic magazines that littered the coffee table, not even looking at her smartphone.

  Truth be told, I was still attracted to her.

  Attracted like any man with warm blood swimming through his veins would be, and for a moment or two, I considered making a pass at her. But she was lost inside herself and now was most definitely not the time.

  But a warm-blooded man could always harbor some hope.

  We left the apartment in silence and drove to the South Pearl Street precinct of the APD located on the other side of the city, across the street from the Henry Johnson Memorial projects. I parked the 4Runner right outside the stone-faced, five-story building and got out.

  Stealing a quick look at the brick-faced projects, I caught a glimpse of a young black man sitting outside on his front porch steps. He was wearing a black wool cap that bore a New York Yankees emblem on it. He was also wearing a long black parka and white basketball shoes with the laces untied. When he noticed me eyeballing him, he opened up the parka to reveal the grip on what looked to me to be a 9mm Sig Sauer.