Harvey's fingers tapped keys yet again, bringing up another link. A table full of weird symbols next to names and descriptions. Dantalion was eighth down.
'Shit,' I hissed.
'Shit about sums it up,' Harvey said. 'This guy's one crazy motherfucker.'
'But why kill a family? What have the Moores got to do with this?'
Throughout our discourse, Marianne had kept her thoughts to herself. But at the mention of the family name, I heard her croak. She stood up slowly and came to stand at my shoulder as she stared at the screen.
'Did you say Moore?'
I nodded to Harvey and he brought us back to the CNN screen.
Marianne's hands went to her mouth. 'Oh, dear God! Caitlin Moore was my teacher at Collinwood High School. It was Caitlin who introduced me to Bradley.'
Harvey turned off the CNN screen as Marianne dropped to the bed. Her hands worked down from her mouth and plucked at an imaginary crucifix at her throat.
'Back in 2002,' she said, her voice barely above a whisper, 'my brother Stephen was among the first Marines to be deployed to Iraq. There was a fear that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction hidden away and Stephen was one of those sent in to try to locate them.'
Uh-oh, I thought, having a feeling where this was going. Richard Dean had never mentioned having had a son. Neither had Marianne mentioned a brother before, nor that he was a soldier. Even when Rink had done a background check on Dean it hadn't come up.
'He was given inoculations to protect him from ABC warfare?' I offered, thinking back to how many times I had stood in a line baring my shoulder for a nurse or doctor with a huge syringe. Never questioning, just taking the injections as protection from the atomic, bacterial and chemical weapons that could be coming our way.
'Yes.' Marianne sucked in a ragged breath. Her next words were a little stronger. 'And it was pointless. As you know, these weapons were never found. Stephen came back from his tour sick. No one would accept that his sickness was as a result of the medication he'd been given. They still won't.
'They said it was psychosomatic. He was imagining his problems. Fatigue, a loss of feeling in his extremities, blinding headaches. It drove him to throw himself off a ten-storey building during an anti-war rally.'
'I'm sorry,' I muttered feeling awkward. 'It's a terrible thing to lose someone. Especially under those circumstances.'
'I miss him dearly. Five years have gone by and there hasn't been a day when I haven't thought about him.'
'Yet you're in love with the man responsible for his death?' I asked.
'Bradley isn't responsible. I don't blame him. Not one little bit.'
'It was medication developed by the Jorgensons that you believe caused Stephen's illness?'
Marianne nodded, then said, 'Mrs Moore was one of my teachers at school, but she was also a trained counsellor. She helped me after my brother's death. We shared common ideas on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our servicemen and women are dying needlessly and all for the wrong reasons.' She blinked, realising that I used to be one of those self-same service men, albeit with a different army, who had fought the same war as her brother. 'I'm very supportive of all our brave soldiers. I'm not against the military at all. I just wanted to do my bit to see our troops were given the respect they were due. I joined a protest group that Mrs Moore had set up to express our views.'
'You attended a meeting with the Jorgenson family?'
'Yes. That's where I first met Brad. He was very charming and he was open to our opinions. He was a good listener. We talked quite a lot afterwards.'
'And that was when you started dating?'
'Yes.'
'But your father didn't approve?'
'My father is still very angry. He hates Bradley. He blames him for Stephen's death, as much as he blames everyone else involved.'
'Maybe he has a right to hate Bradley. Your father showed me photographs of you,' I told her. 'One of you fighting off Bradley in the back of a car. It looked like he was molesting you.'
She shook her head in incredulity. 'Tell me any celebrity that hasn't had a similar photograph taken. We were just playing up to the cameras, Joe, giving the paparazzi something to get excited about. It was a prank. In hindsight it was a bad idea.'
'He showed me a police photo where you had been a victim of assault.'
Her lips pinched.
'Yes.'
'But it wasn't Bradley who beat you up?'
'No, of course not. Bradley loves me and I love him.'
Bradley had been telling the truth. Made me feel a bit of a shit.
'So who was it?' I asked. 'I thought one of his family could be involved. Petre, maybe.'
A quake ran the full length of her body. 'It was my dad.'
I'd already come to that conclusion. It was obvious, when I thought about it. I remembered our first meeting in the grimy roadhouse. As I'd walked away from the bar in Shuggie's Shack, Richard Dean had been fiddling with something that had flashed in the subdued light. Something metallic: her crucifix. He'd stuffed it into his pocket before feeding me a line of bullshit a mile wide.
'He came to Bradley's house to take me home. He accused me of betraying my brother's memory. Said I'd made myself a whore for my brother's murderers. He couldn't see that he was wrong, that Bradley was actually on our side and was prepared to cancel all contracts with the military.' Her fingers went to her throat, teasing the imaginary cross. She began to weep. 'He told me that I had betrayed our family. That my mother would be rolling in her grave. He tore my mother's necklace from my throat. When I tried to take it back he struck me. He was in a rage, and he struck me again and again. He didn't know what he was doing, he was just mad.'
'That's no excuse.'
'I forgive him,' she said. 'I still love him.'
Thinking back to when we'd first broached this subject, I'd assumed that she was referring to Bradley when she'd said similar words. She hadn't been, I saw now. She'd forgiven her father for his actions and his words. But Richard Dean hadn't forgiven anyone.
He had sent me here to take Marianne back to him under false pretences. He had another reason for sending me. I was supposed to stop Bradley coming after her. 'The balance will be paid as soon as I get the proof that Jorgenson is no longer a threat to me or any of my family,' he'd said. His meaning had been explicit. Stop him for good. Kill him.
That wasn't going to happen.
I was going to protect Bradley.
Then I would see to the problem that was Marianne's father.
Rink came out of the bathroom, whistling and scrubbing his hair with a towel.
He stopped and looked at us all.
'What did I miss?'
Where the hell do I start? I thought.
'Nothin' important,' I told him. 'Go and catch that plane, Rink.'
31
There were only two things stopping Dantalion from immediately returning to the Jorgenson estate on Neptune Island.
First, he was unarmed. He'd lost both the Beretta and the Glock in the water. He didn't doubt that he could take a weapon from one of the two-bit guards the Jorgensons had in their employment, but then there was the second thing.
