She looked stunned. “Five days! You’re joking?”
He glanced over at the line of bottles. “Does your head feel like I’m joking?”
She stared at him, then at the bottles, and sat back on the bed. “I hadn’t touched a drop in over six months, can you believe that?”
He glanced at the line of bottles. “No, I can’t.”
She let out a deep groan. “Well, it’s true. I… I can’t believe I did this. I can’t believe I fell off the wagon.”
Shaw looked at the line of bottles again. “It wasn’t a wagon, it was a cliff. I’ll wait in the next room. Get showered and dressed. Then I’ll buy you some breakfast.” He headed to the door.
“Wait a minute, what are you doing out of the hospital?”
“I’m done with hospitals.”
“You really think so?” she said doubtfully, eyeing the bulge under his left jacket sleeve.
“I’m heading to London later today on the Chunnel. But first I wanted to talk to you about Anna.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Why someone would have wanted to kill her.”
Katie stared at him blankly. “But I don’t know anything about that.”
“You might think you don’t. But you also might have seen or heard something when you visited her that could help me.”
“Shaw, do you really think you’re well enough to take this on?”
He turned and fixed his eyes on her, eyes that were so blue and potent that Katie found herself holding her breath, digging her fingernails nervously into her palms like a schoolkid in serious trouble.
He said quietly, “My life is over, Katie. But whoever did this to Anna is going to die. And soon.”
Every hair on the back of Katie’s neck stood straight up and her skin actually goose-pimpled for the first time in years. Her head was pounding and her stomach gave a sudden disquieting lurch.
“Now get dressed. Please.”
As soon as he left the room she sprinted to the bathroom and threw up five days’ worth of liquid hell.
CHAPTER 49
THEY ATE OUTSIDE at a small brasserie that had partial views of the Seine across Quai de Gesvres. If Katie craned her neck just a bit she could glimpse the spires of Notre Dame Cathedral in the middle of the famous river. The Louvre was less than half a mile to their west, the Bastille a little farther than that to the east.
The coffee was strong, the bread hot, the simple egg dish as delicious as only the French seem to be able to accomplish.
“You met her in London,” Shaw said. “At her office? Her flat?”
“We first met at a café, then we moved on to her office.”
“Anything strike you as out of the ordinary when you got there?”
Katie shrugged as she delicately took a forkful of eggs while her stomach continued to do little flip-flops. “It seemed ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. A beautiful old row house on a quiet street in the heart of London filled with a bunch of scholars who write things no one reads, or at least that last part was Anna’s description.” She glanced over at him. “Have you ever been there?”
Shaw nodded. “And just for the hell of it about a year ago I checked the real estate records to see how valuable that building was. Care to guess?” Katie shook her head and bit into a piece of toast as she stared at him curiously. “Sixteen million pounds.”
The toast nearly fell out of Katie’s mouth. “That’s over thirty million dollars.”
“That’s right. And that was just the purchase price ten years ago. It’s obviously worth a lot more now.”