Read Online The Devil's Breath by Graham Hurley - Free Book Online Page A

…’ Telemann prompted. ‘Anything fresh?’
    Benitez nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said.
    ‘You’ve traced it?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Telemann leaned forward from the back-seat, his arms resting on the back of the driver’s seat, cradling his chin. Three days’ intensive work in Washington – page after page of eyes-only Intelligence clattering in over the secure data lines – had simply convinced him that the investigation was presently a matter of focus, of finding something tiny, something simple. Before he went to Tel Aviv, before he touched base again with his Mossad buddies, before he walked into the swamp, he had to make sure there wasn’t something far more obvious staring him in the face. He smiled, looking at Benitez in the gathering darkness, knowing at last that he’d been right. There
was
something far more obvious. The goddamn aerosol.
    ‘So,’ he said, remembering the colour prints faxed up from New York, ‘we have an aerosol. Supposedly full of shaving-foam. Actually full of nerve gas …’ He paused. ‘His? Or hers?’
    ‘Neither.’
    ‘No?’
    ‘No.’ Benitez was smiling now. ‘The aerosol was in the bathroom before they arrived. Along with the soap and the shampoo and the shower-cap. The hotel supply them. It’s part of the service.’ He paused. ‘Compliments of the management.’
    Telemann nodded. ‘So who services the room?’
    ‘Cleaning crews. There are three of them. We pulled in the one that did Room 937 the day our friend booked in. Woman for Queens. Hispanic.’
    ‘And?’
    Benitez looked at him for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Nothing. She says she did the room the same as always. Aerosols came out of a pack. Could have been any one of twenty-four.’
    ‘You believe her?’
    ‘Yeah.’ He nodded. ‘She was the one who discovered the bodies next day. Right there. In the bathroom.’ He paused. ‘Would you do that? If you knew?’
    Telemann smiled, accepting the point. ‘So what are you saying? Someone swopped them?’
    ‘Yeah. After she’d fixed the room.’
    ‘Knowing Gold had booked in?’
    ‘Sure.’
    There was a long silence. Telemann was frowning now, his chin in his hands, propped on the back of his seat. The night the girl arrived from the agency, it had been late. Gold had already eaten. The paperwork from room service proved it. The girl had gone up there, the usual booking, an hour or so, and they’d fucked on the bed a little and maybe gone to the bathroom, Gold still eager for it, a variation or two, her call, or his, still time on the meter, and there on the shelf, the complimentary white aerosol with the red and blue logo, menthol-fresh. She would have reached for it, and gone down on her knees and given him a squirt or two, decorating him maybe, or scrolling some nonsense across his belly, the way he probably said he liked it, but instead of the blobby dots of white foam, and another half-hour or so of lazy screwing, there’d been a thin colourless mist and the far-away smell of rotting fruit, and quickly – in seconds – that long paragraph of symptoms Telemann had by now committed to memory. The nose beginning to run. The tightness in the chest. The bathroom going dim around them, the edges of the shower blurring, the light beginning to fade. Then the first real struggles to breathe, their mouths wide open, their lungs gasping for air. Pretty soon now, their bodies out of control, they’d start to vomit. They’d head for the door. They’d get cramps. They’d fall to the floor, totally haphazard, all control gone. There’d be piss and shit everywhere. Then they’d start to convulse. Time-wise, the literature was explicit. In a hotel bathroom, the door shut, their bodies touching, the sweet intimacy of heavy sex, they’d have been dead in less than a minute.
    Telemann nodded slowly, imagining it all, the most horrible, least graceful of ends. ‘So where did it come from?’ he said softly. ‘Who put it in the room?’
    ‘Kid from