The Shadowkiller Read Free

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    But his plan had failed miserably. Two years had passed without an inch of progress.
    Maybe he’d taken the job as a form of therapy. Maybe he took it to fool Ronnie, since she wouldn’t let him search for his specter out in the open. Maybe he’d been fooling himself all along—about finding it, that is.
    But he’d gambled and lost and now it was time to pay up. He poured more Scotch and toasted again, “To the late Tyler James Greenwood, former software king and former respected family man.”
    He drained the silken, fiery liquid into his throat and jumped up, grabbed a fresh bottle of Glenmorangie from the wet bar, and headed toward the front door. On the way he realized that, aside from his eloquent death manifesto, checking out without a simple good-bye would be downright heartless. Ty weaved down the long hardwood hallway with its fifteen-foot arched ceilings toward the kitchen area, behind which was housed Ronnie’s home office.
    This home was the fantasy he and Ronnie had envisioned years ago, back when they were lowly programmers at a start-up software company, both making twenty-two grand a year and banging off the walls of a cramped two-bedroom, one-bath in Totem Lake with a baby on the way. A perfect place to raise our kids. He crushed the guilty pangs and focused on the job at hand. He made his way around the huge kitchen, the center island alone the size of their last kitchen. He passed by the soaring windows, designed by him to allow as much light as possible on those all-too-often gray Washington days. None of these things gave him the joy they used to.
    In Ronnie’s office, the glowing screen savers on her four computers, the multicolored digital displays from a bank of VHS, CD, and DVD players, along with the assorted red lights from power strips and modulators, all created a sort of Mephistophelean Christmas ambiance. Ronnie’s firm, Digiware Microsystems, and its parent company, NovaSoft Digiware Systems, had a current market share of 1.4 percent of all software sales on earth. Ty was profoundly proud of his wife’s accomplishments and was heartsick that in recent years he’d only been a drain on her.
    You’ll be free of me soon enough, honey.
    He set down the bottle, plopped in front of the home business unit, and hit a key, calling up the desktop. He stared at the blank screen.
    He typed out I l-o-v-e y-o-u. It looked stupid, trite.
    That’s all you can say?
    He tagged it with a-l-l. Worse. I love you all ?
    He erased a-l-l. Back to square one. He erased I love you and then retyped it.
    Christ, I can’t even get past the suicide good-bye.
    He stared at I love you and suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to cry. He’d held it in with iron resolve but now he was losing it. He took a hefty pull off the Scotch, sucked up his courage, and left I love you. He hyperventilated to regain emotional control, then walked out.
    At the coat closet he selected his leather bomber jacket. That’ll be good to die in, kind of a James Dean effect. He paused at the door and for the last time his eyes took in the soaring entry. Under normal circumstances, Ronnie would have set aside that coming Saturday from her busy schedule to decorate for Christmas. He used to love the holidays but his descent over the last three years had erased that little pleasure. One more time he rationalized that the kids would be well taken care of. He also knew they wouldn’t be putting up decorations this year ’cause Dad would be dead. Bummer.
    It was really for the best now—dying, that is. The liquor aided in staving off any further doubt. He was ready to rock. He stepped out the door. It was cold—probably thirty-four degrees—but he was drunk enough that he didn’t really feel it. Though a long covered walkway connected the far end of the house and the garage, Ty walked out under the huge porte cochere, then across their massive circular plaza