Backlash (The Harry Starke Novels Book 15) by Howard Blair

Author:Howard, Blair [Howard, Blair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798503175059
Published: 2021-05-30T05:00:00+00:00

18

“What?” Tim said. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

“Yes, something’s wrong,” I replied, “but it’s no fault of yours. It’s what’s been bugging me ever since I first met the woman. How the hell didn’t I spot it sooner?”

It was a rhetorical question and I didn’t expect an answer.

I leaned back in my chair, linked my fingers together at the back of my neck and stared at the enlarged image—wondering what the hell—as my head filled with images from the past.

“Jacque?” I turned the computer slightly so she could see it.

“Oh, dear Lord,” she said. “It can’t be. Can it?”

I nodded. “I think it is.”

“Well,” T.J. said. “Are you going to share it with us or not?”

“You won’t remember this, T.J., but Tim and Heather will.”

I turned the laptop around to face them.

For a moment no one said a word. They just stared at the screen, then Tim whispered, “Frickin’ hell,” and looked across the table at me, his face pale. Tim never swears. It was a first.

“Oh my, really?” was all Heather said.

“What?” T.J. said. “All I can see is a necklace.”

“Yeah, it’s that all right,” Tim said.

Around Jay Coin’s neck was a thin gold chain from which hung a tiny gold circlet—two snakes entwined eating each other’s tail—and oh how it brought back memories.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s a necklace, a very special necklace. The circlet is an Ouroboros or, in this case, its Hindu symbolism, kundalini. The two snakes represent eternity, but this necklace represents something else entirely.”

I paused for a moment, thinking, remembering. “It was before your time, T.J., a case we handled back in early 2015. It concerned a young woman, Tabitha Willard. She had one just like it. I’d never met the girl, well, I did, in a way, in Doc Sheddon’s lab. I was also there when she committed suicide… threw herself off the Walnut Street bridge. I tried to stop her, but…” I paused again as my heart seemed to well up in my throat as I remembered that awful night in December 2014.

“But that’s a long and complicated story,” I continued. “She was wearing one of those when she jumped.” I nodded at the laptop. “It was the key to solving the case. I put away Congressman Harper and two members of his staff. Harper died in prison a couple of years later, but not before hiring a hitman—a woman, actually—to kill Amanda and me. The assassin almost got me and would have but for you and Amanda.” I looked at Tim when I said that.

He simply grinned, put his forefinger to the bridge of his glasses and shoved them further up the bridge of his nose, looking embarrassed.

“Anyway,” I continued, “as I said, that necklace was key to solving the case, but it was also the key to something else. Billy Harper was blackmailing high-ranking members of congress and the senate. To be able to do that he photographed and videotaped them in compromising situations. Through his influence, they were introduced

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