Third Strike: A Charlie Fox Mystery Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ST. MARTIN’S / MINOTAUR PAPERBACKS TITLES BY ZOË SHARP

  CRITICAL PRAISE FOR THE WORKS OF ZOË SHARP!

  Copyright Page

  This is a book about parents, and I

  shall always be profoundly grateful to mine.

  For Derek and Jill

  CHAPTER 1

  I was running when I saw my father kill himself. Not that he jumped off a tall building or stepped in front of a truck but—professionally, personally—what I watched him do was suicide.

  Although I hadn’t been keeping a check of the distance, I reckoned I’d covered around eight miles at that point. Not fast, not slow. Just nicely settled into a rhythm where I could concentrate on working through the pain barrier. After six months’ slog, it didn’t seem to be getting any less solid, nor any further away. The doctors had told me I’d probably make a full recovery from the double-gunshot injury that had damn near been the end of me. They just hadn’t said when.

  But just as I thought I might finally reach the finish this time before I hit that particular wall, I ran headlong into something else entirely.

  As soon as I saw him, my stride faltered, all coordination leaving me. I stumbled and fell against the guardrail of the treadmill, rebounding heavily. The heart rate monitor pads came away from my chest and the alarm began to screech.

  “Charlie!” Nick, my personal trainer, reached out a steadying arm. “Are you all right? Your leg—”

  I shook my head, shook him off. “Turn it up,” I said, swiping the sweat out of my eyes. When Nick just gaped, I jerked my head towards the overhead TV. “The sound, Nick. Turn up the damn sound!”

  I hadn’t immediately recognized my father on the morning news program playing silently above me during this latest fitness test, but that was no great surprise. I was in New York City and he was safely back home in England—or so I’d thought. I hadn’t spoken to him since I’d moved out here in the spring.

  Not that relocating permanently to the States had greatly widened the rift that already existed between us. My parents had always disliked the career that had chosen me, almost as much as they’d disliked the man who’d helped make that choice: Sean Meyer.

  Knowing the main reason I’d come here was to be with Sean didn’t exactly make them enthusiastic about the whole scheme. And the fact that the pair of us had been offered jobs with Parker Armstrong’s exclusive close-protection agency working out of midtown Manhattan probably put the final seal of disapproval on it for them.

  The Americans, I’d discovered, had a policy about persistent offenders—three strikes and you were out. As far as my parents were concerned I’d had my third strike and they were finished with me, and I’d done my best to put them out of my mind.

  So, my father was the last person I’d expected to see on one of the news channels, but it was the scrolling headline across the bottom of the screen that identified him with the words DISGRACED BRITISH DOCTOR FACES QUESTIONS that really rocked me.

  The “doctor” part was familiar, at least, although that was a little like describing Field Marshal Montgomery as a mere soldier. My father was a consultant orthopedic surgeon, brilliant, arrogant, at the top of his game.

  But the rest of the caption—now that didn’t square with the man I knew at all.

  So, what the hell …

  Nick, slow with sculpted muscle, had dropped the clipboard on which he’d been keeping a nitpicking note of my progress and had grabbed for the remote control, fumbling with the volume. He overdid the balance and suddenly my father’s cool clipped tones cut across the gym, startling the handful of other occupants.

  “Patients die,” he said with a bluntness that would never win him the sympathy vote. “Sometimes it happens, despite one’s best efforts.”

  “So tell me, Doctor,” said the woman with the big hair and the microphone, “exactly how many patients would you normally expect to die in your care?” Her tone was snappy, verging on a gloat.

  “I have been a surgeon for over thirty years,” my father said, supercilious. He was holding his shoulders tightly bunched and the normal wealthy tan of his face was bleached out, the skin drum taut across his bones. “I don’t expect to lose any.”

  “So you’re claiming this is an isolated case?” the woman said blandly. “Surely, Doctor—”

  “It’s Mister, not Doctor,” he cut in acidly over the top of his gold-framed glasses, the same way he would have castigated a junior trainee who bungled a simple diagnosis. “Kindly make some attempt to get your facts correct, madam.”

  I sucked in a breath. I’d skirmished with the media myself in the past, enough to know that outright provocation was a grave mistake. They had the ultimate power, after the event, to maneuver you into the role of villain or fool, according to their whim. They’d played both ends of that game with me, and won with insolent ease.

  Her eyes narrowed momentarily, but she was too much of a pro to let him rattle her. Instead, she tilted her head and smiled unpleasantly. “Oh, I think you’ll find that I’ve done my research very carefully,” she said. “Last week, for instance, I know that one of your patients died suddenly and unexpectedly in a hospital in Massachusetts.”

  He paused just a fraction too long before responding. “Yes, but no surgery had been performed—”

  “And that your first reaction was to try and shift the blame for this away from yourself by claiming that the patient in question had deliberately been given an overdose of morphine. Despite the fact,” she went on, steamrollering over any attempt at interruption, “that no evidence has been found to support this.”

  “I have withdrawn my comments,” my father said stiffly, with such self-control that I could almost hear his teeth enamel breaking up under the strain. “And it would be unethical for me to discuss—”

  “‘Unethical?’” She cut in, her voice cool even though her eyes betrayed the glitter. “Isn’t it the case that the patient in question, Jeremy Lee, was an old friend of yours and was suffering from a painful degenerative disease? You were very … close to his wife, I understand,” she murmured. Her voice was artfully casual, but the unspoken inference came across loud and clear. “You were staying with Mrs. Lee—alone, at her home—while you were treating her husband in the hospital. Isn’t that somewhat … unethical?”

  Walk away. I found myself willing him, hands clenched. Why are you standing there like a bloody fool and letting her carve you up like this? Walk. Away.

  But he didn’t.

  “I’ve known both the Lees for many years,” he said instead, keeping his impatience in check only with visible effort. “It’s natural that I should stay with Miranda—Mrs.
Lee—while I’m in America. It was Mrs. Lee herself who asked me to come and advise on her husband’s condition. Nothing more.” I wondered if he knew that his uneasy denials only added weight to the reporter’s snide insinuations.

  “I see,” she said, injecting an artful note of doubt into her voice. She frowned, as though considering his words and her own carefully, but underneath it I saw the triumph building, and realized that she’d been leading him to this point right from the start. “And is Mrs. Lee aware that you’ve been suspended from your duties for being drunk on the job?”

  “I have never endangered a patient through alcohol,” my father snapped, but as he spoke something flickered in his face. I saw it only because I was looking, but I knew others would be watching him just as closely and they would have seen it, too.

  Guilt. Unmistakable.

  Holy shit …

  “But you don’t deny that you’ve made life-and-death decisions after you’ve had a drink, Mr. Foxcroft?” She left a pause he didn’t rush to fill and she allowed herself a small smile, as though politely acknowledging his admission. “Maybe even a couple of drinks.” Smooth, smiling, she moved in for the kill. “Isn’t it the case that your earlier allegation was simply an attempt to divert attention from your own transgressions?”

  My father flushed, took a breath. “The hospital will no doubt hold some kind of internal inquiry. Until then, it would be improper to comment further,” he said, struggling to regroup and only managing to sound pompous instead. “Not to mention unprofessional and unfair to the patient’s family.”

  She didn’t quite crow at this obvious retreat, but she allowed herself the luxury of another feline smile. “Oh, really, Mr. Foxcroft,” she said. “I think it’s a little late to worry about things like that, isn’t it?”

  He stiffened. “At this stage I have nothing further to add to my statement,” he said. And then, just when I’d begun to think that the whole thing was some kind of gigantic mistake, he took my breath away by adding, “I—I’ve admitted that I have a problem with alcohol. I have agreed to withdraw from all surgical procedures and take an unpaid leave of absence until that problem is resolved.”

  What?

  Finally—finally—he began to move away, but the reporter wasn’t so easily shaken off. They were on a city street, I saw, with generic modern concrete buildings behind them and the sound of traffic in the background. My father was wearing an immaculate dark blue suit, white shirt, sober tie that reeked discreetly of old school, his thinning hair sleek to his scalp. An archetypal authority figure. The kind the media loved to see crash and burn.

  “Mr. Foxcroft, numerous patients must have—perhaps misguidedly—placed their trust in you as a highly respected member of the medical profession,” she persisted, thrusting the microphone into his face. “Have you nothing to say to them?”

  “Charlie, what the—” Nick began, unconsciously echoing my earlier thought, as his brain finally caught up with what was happening.

  “Ssh!” I braced my arms on the front of the stationary treadmill, suddenly far more badly winded than a mere eight-mile jog would ever justify.

  My father paused and, possibly for the first time in my life, I saw uncertainty in him. Perhaps even the faintest suggestion of panic.

  He glanced away from the woman’s face and looked directly into the camera, as though he could see me staring back at him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said simply. Then he turned, ignoring the clamor the apparent admission caused, ducked into a waiting car, and was gone.

  The reporter faced the camera, power suit, power makeup, scarlet nails clutched round her microphone as she delivered her gleeful wrap-up. Her words scalded me but afterwards I couldn’t recall a single one of them.

  It had finally dawned on me that the reporter was a regular on one of the local news channels. That the car my father had climbed into was a black Lincoln Town Car with no stretch, and the building he’d been standing outside was one of the big hotels less than a dozen blocks from where I stood.

  He was right here. In New York. In trouble.

  And I hadn’t known a thing about it.

  Nick still had hold of the remote control. He was big enough that it looked like a toy in his hands. As the reporter handed back to the studio, he thumbed the volume down again and eyed me with quizzical concern.

  “So, that guy—someone you know?”

  For a moment I didn’t—couldn’t—answer. My head was buzzing like I’d taken a blow. My leg ached fiercely, more of a burn. “I thought I knew him,” I murmured at last, slowly. “But now I’m not so sure.”

  Nick frowned. “You okay to go on?” he said. “Or you wanna take five?”

  That got my attention. I flicked him a fast glance. “Look, Nick, I need to leave. Now.”

  “You can’t,” he said. He picked up his clipboard, lifted a page, frowning harder. “You got maybe another twenty minutes, tops, then we’re all done. Way you’re going, you’re gonna ace this. C’mon Charlie, what’s so important that it can’t wait twenty minutes?”

  “That,” I said, jerking my head towards the TV set. I scooped up my towel from the bench and started for the changing rooms, only to feel Nick’s hand rough on my shoulder.

  “Hey! You don’t walk out on me, lady.” His voice rose, harsh. “Mr. Armstrong pays me for results and I got a lotta time invested in you.”

  The only excuse I have for what happened next is that my mind was half in shock from the news report. It slackened the usual restraints that govern my behavior and my temper ignited to a white hot burn. I grabbed his imprisoning hand and stepped out from underneath it, jerking the heel of his palm upwards into a vicious lock.

  Nick was around six foot one and more than two hundred pounds. He had six inches in height and maybe eighty pounds on me. Now, he tried to use that differential in resistance but his bulk was gym cultivated. Useful as a deterrent maybe, but clearly he had never been a fighter.

  I tightened the lock and yanked him round like an Olympic hammer thrower going for gold. He sprawled into one of the racks of dumbbells, sending half of them rebounding to the wooden floor, and thudded down heavily onto his knees. The noise was thunderous. Somebody nearby—a man—squealed.

  I still had the lock on his wrist. Nick was grunting now, his substantial muscles trembling. In the right hands, pain compliance can be a wonderful thing. I leaned in close enough to smell the sweat.

  “I’m in a hurry, so I’m willing to forget what just happened here,” I said, my voice entirely reasonable. “But if you ever lay a hand on me again, you’re the one who’s going to need half a year of physio, okay?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Driving a car in Manhattan is madness, but reliably parking one there is worse. So, one of my first actions when we’d arrived was to buy another motorcycle. I’d left my Honda Fire-Blade in storage when I’d left the UK and missed it every day.

  As soon as I’d felt physically capable of riding it, I’d succumbed and, in deference to my new adopted homeland, had bought a midnight black Buell XB12R Firebolt. It didn’t have the outright speed of the’Blade, but it was skinny and nimble enough to slice through the midtown crush. Most of the time, at any rate.

  Usually, I can slip relatively unimpeded through the vast sea of yellow cabs that seem to outnumber the private cars on Manhattan Island by at least two to one. But today, because I was under pressure, because I was in a hurry, nobody wanted to give me mirror-width gaps. I’d cracked the left-hand mirror less than a month after I’d bought the bike, and I didn’t want to add to the bad luck.

  So I sat, feeling the nagging pulse in my left leg, hemmed in by hot steel boxes vibrating gently as they scattered heat and fumes into the surrounding air, listening to the symphony of the city. Going nowhere. Ahead, Lexington Avenue ran arrow-straight south almost to vanishing point, like a taunt.

  Around me, the monumental buildings of New York hummed and breathed. It was early September, balmy after the brutal summer jus
t past, the temperature shedding its way gently into the time of year I still thought of as autumn rather than fall.

  And all the while, I was running through scenarios of how on earth a man as coldly disciplined as my father could possibly have caused a patient to die under his hands through sheer bloody carelessness.

  “Until that problem is resolved,” he’d said, like being a possible alcoholic was a temporary, minor inconvenience.

  I cast back through the empty rooms that held my childhood memories, but nothing clicked into place. There had been no unexplained clinking from the wastepaper basket in his study, no long periods he’d spent in the garden nursing a furtive hip flask, no telltale smear of peppermint across his breath. He liked the occasional single malt and drank it like a connoisseur, with due reverence and ceremony. No more than that.

  But every time I thought I’d come up with some plausible excuse, his own words damned him all over again.

  A long time ago, when I’d been up to my ears in scandal not entirely of my own making, I’d officially shortened my name from Foxcroft to Fox. At the time I’d explained my decision away to my half-offended, half-relieved parents by telling them I didn’t want to drag their name through the mire along with my own.

  I’d never considered for a moment that one day it might also work in reverse.

  The hotel where I suspected my father was staying was Italian owned and run. Elevated in status more by its location than its own merits. Shabby chic. I took one look at the haughty doorman outside and knew I wasn’t going to be able to charm or bribe my way through this one.

  I found an alleyway where I could ditch the bike, and legged it two blocks south to the nearest booze store, where I bought a bottle of twenty-one-year-old Dalmore Scotch. I had to show my driver’s licence in order to prove I was older than the whisky, even though I was six years past that milestone birthday. Way I’d felt lately, it could have been sixty.

  Outside, I flagged down a cab, my heart sinking a little when I saw the Pakistani driver. I worried that he might have an ethical problem with carrying alcohol, but as soon as I started explaining what I wanted, his face split into a toothy grin.