His connection to his famous relative was known and accepted by some, if the legitimacy was sometimes argued by others. Though Georges had died a young man, only thirty-one, of meningitis or diptheria, depending on whom you believed, he had two hidden families. Most knew about Madeline Knobloch, of course, but few knew of his other mistress, from whom the director of CyberNation was himself descended…
The day was warm and sunny, and Seurat enjoyed the bustle and sounds of the city as he walked along the Rue Vernet, toward the Elysees Star Hotel. There was a woman he had met there once, a Spanish countess, ah…
He saw the Saudi prince lounging in a cast-iron chair at the outdoor cafe down from the hotel, a cup of tea or coffee on the small table before him. Such cafes were traditional in Paris, of course, though Seurat himself thought that drinking coffee and having croissants with a steady stream of noisy automobiles passing by was hardly relaxing. There were cafes on some of the pedestrian malls, streets that had been closed to vehicular traffic but not those on foot, that he found much more appealing. It was hard to appreciate the swaying walk of a beautiful woman in high heels when a moving van with a loud muffler crept past and belched smelly exhaust at you.
The prince was in a business suit that had probably cost more than the price of the average car. The prince, who liked to downplay that and be called Said, saw Seurat strolling in his direction. He raised his cup in salute.
Seurat smiled and nodded.
A sudden darkness rolled over the street. Seurat frowned and looked up, to see a rain cloud blotting the sun. That had come up fast—
A lightning bolt lanced down from the cloud, struck a group of walkers waiting to cross at an intersection, and scattered them as if a bomb had gone off in their midst.
A demonic voice began to laugh loudly as more lightning played over the street. Hail started to fall, clumps as big as golf balls, smashing down; hurricane winds blew, and people on the street screamed and ran for cover—
Merde! The bastard whoreson hacker was at it again—!
Seurat stripped the sensory gear off, still enraged. Losing a potential client was bad, but not major. That the hacker was still able to attack CyberNation seemingly at will was major. He had already called his technical people and they were on the hunt, but he did not hold out much hope for a quick taking of prey.
This had to stop. And when the man responsible was caught, Seurat wanted to see him put into a hole so far down that the light of day would never touch him again.
Merde!
17
Getting rid of a body was not nearly as worrisome as all the forensic television shows and movies made it out to be. The main trick was to make sure the corpse wasn’t discovered before you were far enough away that the authorities couldn’t possibly link it to you. And not to leave anything really obvious around that pointed in your direction — DNA, fingerprints, or your business card…
All that stuff where they took a hair and put it into some medical machine that whirred and fifteen seconds later spit out a picture of the killer? Total fabrication.
Locke had wrapped the blackmailer up in the bed’s top sheet, waited until dark, and taken the corpse to his rental car, where he put it into the trunk. He’d located the motel’s cleaning woman, waited until she had gone into an empty room to clean it, and taken a clean sheet from the stack on the cart to replace the missing one.
The next morning — one did not want to skulk around late at night with a body in one’s car trunk and risk being pulled over by a bored policeman — Locke drove to a nearby industrial district and scouted it. It took but half an hour for him to find what he was looking for. He found the number of a real estate agent on the sign in front of the building, made a call from a pay telephone, and determined the information he needed. Luck ran his way — the place was perfect.
From there, he drove to a local mall and bought supplies. From a hardware store, he purchased a hand-truck dolly, a battery-powered Skil Saw, a tree saw, and a hammer, along with a small machete, a painter’s drop cloth, and a box of green plastic leaf bags. He also picked up a set of painter’s coveralls, shoe covers, and rubber gloves, and several bottles of spray cleaner and paint thinner.
At an art supply store, he bought a large roll of plastic wrap and another of white butcher’s paper, along with a black marking crayon.
He found a cyber cafe, bought an hour on a computer, and logged on to the Internet. There, he found an appliance store, and using a PayPal account into which he had deposited several thousand dollars under a phony name months before, bought a chest freezer and arranged to have it delivered immediately to the address he had found in the industrial district.
At a long-term parking lot near a new commuter airport, he stole a minivan, swapping the license plates on it with the car parked next to it. He wore a basic disguise when he did this — a hat, a pair of sunglasses, and a fake moustache — and paid the lot fee on the stolen car at an automated exit teller. He drove back to his rental car, parked in a lot next to a cinema complex, and transferred the body and supplies to the new vehicle.
He drove out into the Virginia countryside, found what looked like an old and mostly unused logging road in a pine forest, and drove until he was several miles away from the main road.
He got out, dressed in the coveralls and shoe covers, and put the gloves on.
He carried the rest of his supplies and the body into the woods. He laid out the drop cloth and unwrapped the body onto it. He removed the clothes and put them into a trash bag.
It took a couple of hours to get the body reduced to packages of five pounds or less, fifteen minutes alone to saw the head into small bits and knock all the teeth out. Each part was wrapped in plastic, then in butcher’s paper and marked with a crayon: steaks, roasts, ribs, chops.
When he was done, he rolled the bloody drop cloth up and put it into a plastic bag, cleaned the saws and machete carefully, then loaded these into three different plastic bags. He removed the coveralls, gloves, and shoe protectors, and put them into another bag.
He packed up and left.
Back at the industrial site, which was a recently emptied building, he parked in the back where he’d had the freezer delivered. He picked the lock on the door, and used the hand truck to move the small freezer into the building. He removed the freezer from its corrugated cardboard box, and took the styrofoam packaging out. As the real estate agent had told him, the electricity was still on, and was supposed to stay on for at least a month, because there was a new tenant due to move into the building then. He found an outlet and plugged in the freezer.
He transferred the packages from the van and put them into the freezer, all except the bits of head and fingers, closed the freezer, relocked the door, and drove away. It wasn’t recommended, to load a freezer that way before it got cold, but if the meat was burned a little, that didn’t really matter. Eventually it would go solid.