Beg Me (27 page)

Whatever Danielle wanted, I assumed it was intended to be confidential. Knowing I was in the city, she could have picked any spot in Manhattan, so I had to wonder why she insisted on Central Park. But she was the duchess—I was Cinderella.

I crossed into New York’s huge rectangle of green on the eastern side, Fifth Avenue above 102nd Street, and asked passersby for directions to what was called the Loch.

It took me a while to navigate the footpaths of the North Woods, and there was Danielle up ahead, patient and smiling. That alone should have set off an alarm. But it was daytime, a sunny afternoon, and she appeared to be alone.

I hiked over to her, nodding politely and saying, “Hey.” Wondering why she was so happy to see me. Not happy. Smug.

The Loch is beautiful, really, not that I ever want to visit it again. Not ever. It lies at the bottom of what they call the Ravine, and there’s the gurgling stream and Huddlestone Arch, all woodland-picturesque.

But when I walked up to it in this chilling moment, Danielle waved to the view and asked me, “This is a gorgeous spot! Don’t you think?”

Lying on the rocks, her temple robes stained a hideous red, lay Violet. The knife was still plunged into her chest, but it was clear she’d been stabbed multiple times. Her face, emptied of color, was a mask of innocent, helpless shock.

I stared at Danielle, thinking I might throw up. The finishing touch was her voice ever so softly, ever so sweetly asking me, “You want your necklace back?”

No.
No, no, no. NO!

“She was wearing it the other day,” explained Danielle, her voice still matter-of-fact. “That made me sure—you know? I mean, I thought I caught a glimmer when you two were introduced, but there’s an element of sexuality in every friendship, right? But your gift! Too nice, even for a new friend. And she wore it so proudly, just like a lover. It got me thinking, because, hey, you can’t get that kind of jewelry anywhere, even in New York. Benin, right?”

Oh, God. How could I have been so stupid?

She must have recognized the style of the piece—because she’d been there. Nigeria.

“Sure you don’t want the necklace back?” she purred. “You’ll need the receipt.”

I couldn’t stop my tears if I’d wanted to.

I’d been so careful. Left my passport and other ID back with the staff at the Chelsea—even rented a new cell phone with added security when I knew I was going undercover in the mansion.

Tiny little scrap of cash register paper, the name of the shop in blue ink.

She must have dug through my purse, checking on me, even while I checked on her at one of the library computers.

“I bet you think you’re so clever,” said Danielle. “Making a fool out of that stupid weak clown Oliver. But clever girls like you just have to show off your smarts and your sophistication.”

I couldn’t follow—just stared at her blankly. Violet. Oh, Violet.

So she made it clear for me. “We went back and spoke to those bimbos Oliver takes as arm candy to the club. Remember them? I don’t blame you, really. Christ, they are stupid! I know houseplants with larger vocabularies. And you held up your passport to shut ’em up, but one of them, Teresa—one of them
does
remember the pretty stamps on the pages. Nigeria, Sudan, Thailand…”

No. If I hadn’t given her the necklace—

If I hadn’t wanted to show up those silly girls—

“Let me guess,” said Danielle. “Craig Padmore’s family hired you, right? I knew we should have come up with a motive!”

Let her think what she wants for now.

“An accou-accountant…”

“Sorry, what was that, honey?”

“An accountant shot execution-style in his home,” I said slowly, my voice still trembling. “Yeah, it raises que-questions. Why? Why Violet? She couldn’t know anything!”

“But she was special to you,” said Danielle sweetly. “That’s good enough.”

“Wh-why?” I demanded, my voice cracking with my torment. “Why br-bring me here?”

“So you’ll get blamed for it!”

And she giggled and laughed, laughed some more, full of glee and bloodlust at the big joke, and sprinted away, calling back to me, “You don’t fuck with us!”

I stole a last look at my poor girl and got the picture. The knife. I had looked but not seen a moment earlier—it was a common butcher knife, like the kind used in the kitchen at the mansion. I’d been cutting fat from chops with that kind of knife only yesterday, and ten to one my fingerprints were on that instrument.

I ran and ran after Danielle, who was setting a fierce pace.

“Teresa!” Panicked voice I didn’t know. “Teresa, honey, no, please!”

What the…?

It cut through my grief and outrage. A surreal interruption that came out of nowhere—and was supposed to.

Black guy I had never seen before in my life. Not outside, not at the mansion. Square head but full head of hair, full mustache, and cruel eyes, bulk on him. Another outside contractor like the Asian tagalong thug in Bangkok.

He ran a few yards behind Danielle through the trees, then stopped in my path. All at once, my mind flashed an insight of why he was here and why Danielle had run, knowing I would chase her. This was yet another fantasy in the making—my assassin who would claim it was self-defense. My “ex-lover” forced to kill me after I discovered him with his new girlfriend. A knife for her, a gun for me.

“No, baby, don’t do it!” he shouted. Loud enough for people to hear but no witnesses around to see.

I dove to the ground and rolled. As I picked myself up, I saw the guy frown, his mouth hissing the word
shit
as he stopped himself from firing his pistol. The scenario only worked if we were up close and “struggling” for the weapon.

Now he was chasing after me through the woods, trying to intercept me before I got back to the main path, where joggers and strollers would spot me in trouble.

I had to let that bitch escape.

And she would have to let me.

When I looked back, the hired killer was gone.

Violet. I flagged down someone to call 911 on their cell, and I stayed with her until the police arrived.

Detective John Chen’s voice was tired as he handed me a cup of coffee and put my mind at rest. “Yeah, I know you didn’t do it, Teresa. For fuck’s sake, I heard her lure you on the phone.”

We sat on a distant bench as the police radios squawked, and I tried not to watch my girl being taken away in a zippered bag.

“And I don’t need the medical examiner to give me a short course on postmortem lividity,” he said, his voice sour. “Time of death is always a problem, but one of our forensics guys says she’s cold. That’s absolutely impossible if she was stabbed about an hour ago. Her body temp would still be fairly up there, even with contact on those rocks and the water. They probably killed your friend right after you left the house. Sorry.”

Violet.

“Cameras,” I said suddenly. “You guys closed-circuit-TV everything in parks and such like the British police do, right?”

Chen nodded. “Yep. But my guess is they were smart about the body dump—”

I looked at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “About the way they left—”

“What do you mean they were smart?” I prompted.

“They probably got as close as they could from the Ninety-seventh Street Transverse, smuggled her down in a maintenance cart or something. We’ll see what the cameras show, but with the trees and line of sight, I’m not hopeful.”

“But Danielle—”

“Teresa.”
He cut me off, hard.

I paid attention.

“She led you here, and I can confirm that much,” said Chen. “But it’s not enough. She’ll claim you two came across the body by accident and she simply freaked out and ran. There’ll be piss-poor audio, if there’s any usable closed-circuit at all, and from what you’ve told me all she did was stand there and try to provoke you. I can’t hold her for that. At
best,
we’ll have you running after her through those bushes and then you running back. Right now they’re probably cleaning up on Staten Island. Making sure it looks like the girl never stepped foot in that mansion.”

I felt a sob rising like a shudder through my body. “It’s my fault….”

“How can this be your fault?” he asked. The voice of detached professional reason.

I explained about the necklace, burying my face in my hands.

“She was a close friend, then?”

“You could say that. And more.”

Holding his coffee cup with both hands, he hung his head with delicate, perfect sympathy and confided, “Listen, I don’t know anything about black culture, to be honest with you—my girlfriend likes Sean Paul, but that’s about it, so…What I’m saying is I was raised Buddhist, and we believe that good people are reborn in higher incarnations until they reach Nirvana. Maybe there’s some comfort in that idea—”

He stopped himself all of a sudden, turning apologetic. “Oh, shit, you’re probably Christian, right? Sorry, sorry, sorry—you’re what? Do they have Baptists in Britain or—”

“Tiger Woods.”

“Excuse me?”

“Tiger Woods,” I said, the idea crystallizing and sharpening into focus.

And, oh, my God, this is what it’s always been about all this time.

Craig Padmore understood as he dug through the French book about the Vietnam War. It was never right in the pages, but it was a logical implication. Who still gets hurt by war after the war is over?

“What?” demanded Chen. “What the hell does murder have to do with golf?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Come on, we’ve got to go do some research!”

13

I
explained the spark, what had prompted the idea. He thought we were wasting our time, but I managed to persuade him. He didn’t buy it at first because who bothers to go for a legal name change if your name is already your dad’s? You’re not thinking about it in the right direction, I said.

Plus, he argued, Isaac Jackson didn’t have a criminal record, which is always high on the list for ditching who you used to be.

Wrong direction, I said.

None of it would make sense unless my theory was right.

Both of us could still hardly believe it when the proof rolled out of his mobile car fax. We were staring at a copy of the petition that went to the New York State legal authorities in Albany eighteen years ago. Our temple leader had changed his name, all right.

It took us another hour or so and Chen flashing his badge to everybody we came across, but eventually we had what we needed: a twenty-year-old piece of paper dug up from the right district branch of the U.S. federal government.

Then we made some more phone calls and filled in the jigsaw portrait.

I had been right about them from the beginning. Danielle was the power, but Isaac was the key. Until today, however, I couldn’t dig deep enough into the background of Isaac Jackson.

It was because there never really was an Isaac Jackson—not an Isaac Jackson
Jr.
There was and there wasn’t, you see. Even though the original Isaac Jackson, the fellow who had died of tuberculosis, who had gone in and out of psychiatric institutions, the poor man haunted by war and drugs, had indeed been the cult leader’s father.

Detective John Chen stared at the photo and the signatures, and he whispered my same thought. “Unbelievable.”

We heard his cell ring, and I listened to Chen whisper a horrified “Jesus Christ” and then “yeah” and “yeah” and “yeah, thanks” before hanging up. I held up my hands, impatiently demanding,
Well?

“We have a problem,” he said, “and I am going to need your help desperately with a capital
D.
We’re racing the clock. Oh, God…”

“What? What is it?”

“You gave me a yellow pill and an orange one as samples,” said Chen. “The yellow one is high-quality ecstasy, as good as it gets.”

“And the orange?”

“Laced with a fatal dose of strychnine. Ten, twenty minutes after you take the hit, you go into violent convulsions. Respiratory paralysis causes you to asphyxiate. Horrible way to go.”

Literally, a death rattle. God in heaven.

“It’s mass slaughter,” I said, scarcely believing it.

“It gets worse. We raided the lab. They’ve shipped out.”

A nightmare, probably hours away.

“Strychnine? How the hell did they come up with strychnine?”

Chen was surprised at me. “You should know. You found the link.” And when I didn’t catch on, he added, “They use it in pesticides and rat poisons. You said they own an insecticide company, right?”

“Oh, God. Of course! Just one more license.”

“This must be Isaac Jackson’s idea of a sick joke.”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“Back in the sixties, there used to be an urban myth that strychnine could be found in tiny doses in tabs of acid,” explained Chen. “It’s bullshit, according to our chemists. But I guess Isaac wanted to make this idea come true.”

“I think the massacre’s
her
idea,” I said. “Danielle uses a Chinese gang as a go-between, and all the deaths will destroy their credibility. Then she and Isaac take over the market.”

“And Isaac won’t mind all this death?”

“You know how much he hates Asians,” I said, struggling to suppress a shiver. “And now we know why. Jeez, we’ve got to stop this fast.”

“It’ll take forever to get a search warrant for their house,” said Chen. “And the drugs won’t be there anyway. All I’m left with is intercepting these guys on the street when they try to unload. At least we’ve got some idea of who their contacts are and roughly where they’ll be, thanks to that list you made.”

“Then you’d better toss the net now,” I suggested. “Start whatever process you need for your warrant and go pick up the pushers.”

“Better believe it! And you’re coming with.”

“Me?”

“You recognize these clowns,” he reminded me. “You know the ones in the group who will deliver the stuff. Plus you might be able to persuade them to give up their buddies. I have a feeling they won’t take too kindly to finding out they’re about to exterminate their customers—and who they’re really working for.”

“Let’s go, then.”

He escorted me to the station house, which, I kid you not, looked like a stage set out of a sequel to
Blade Runner.
Glass and chrome and writing in Chinese, overhead fan blades yet state-of-the-art computer terminals with very large rectangle screens. Several white officers, many Chinese in plain clothes, only a couple in uniform. And not one African-American. Big surprise there. The wanted posters on the cork bulletin board advertised several unwelcome guests from Hong Kong.

Violet.

Think about her later.

It’s not disloyal to put her out of your mind for now. You’ve got a job to do. You’ve got to help.

There will be time for grief.

From a distance, I watched Chen brief a potbellied white guy with a loosened necktie, and then he sauntered back and told me, “Let’s get moving.” His superior, he said, would wrangle with the DAs. They actually
did
call them DAs. I always thought that was just television dialogue.

Back in Chinatown after dark. This was Chen’s show for the most part, and an hour and a half went by of him saying, “Stay in the car,” and me watching him jump out here and there to talk to an informant. Or the guy minding the tubs of fish and the eel in the tanks. Or the leathery woman who ignored the cigarette ash she dropped on her vegetables. Or the skateboard kid. Or the busboy smoking on a corner.

I can’t whistle very well, but I must have done it loudly enough for Chen to turn his head. Then he spotted what I saw.

White panel truck.

Now, lots of white panel trucks were in the district, but only one had four Asian guys—and Trey.

As I opened the car door, I heard Chen yell to the two plainclothes detectives who had tagged along—they were closer. Then the white guys in suits were bearing down on them, and the Asians knew they were cops even before they raised their voices to shout. So did Trey.

“Stop! Police!”

Wait a minute. Trey wouldn’t have come alone—

Guns out. Guns out from both sides. Trey ducking for cover while the Asian dealers aimed their mean mother barrels sideways.

“John!” I yelled.

Gordon behind us all, putting us in the turkey shoot between him and Trey’s pals. He was firing wild. Too much going on: shots and tinny music and angry yells, a knocked-over table full of incense sticks and cheap pencil sets, a firecracker bedlam even as I heard wind chimes ring.

This poor frightened mother and her little girl were staring at me. She screamed because a crazy black woman was running headlong to tackle them, push them down. Don’t let them get hit. No more innocents please. Anna, Craig, Kelly Rawlins. Violet.

Violet.

John Chen’s a New York police detective. That means he practices shooting a gun. It means he has to shoot it better than a civilian.

He turned, and I heard
bang bang bang bang,
and two of the Asian guys at the van dropped. It was enough to scare Gordon into doing a full-out sprint. He ran, stumbled into an innocent Chinese guy in a baseball cap, and pushed past him. Chen couldn’t fire anymore as Gordon melted into the crowd. Damn it.

Bangkok flashback. You know how they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? I say insanity is running for the second time in a half year after a man with a loaded gun, expecting you will not be shot.

Chance favors the prepared mind. And occasionally the oblivious idiot.

“Knight! Knight!” Chen shouting. Made sense to nobody else on the street, not even Gordon and Trey, who didn’t know my real last name.

Gordon tried to slow down as he hit Mulberry Street. When he turned back to check if he was being followed, he finally recognized me.

“Teresa?”

I watched it hit him like waves—all of it happening in mere seconds. First, bewilderment that I could be here, could have escaped my fate, then the impossible coincidence, then logic, anger, the spur to action. And a raised fist. He didn’t think to lift his gun. When he lurched a counter to my punch, the gun came back to him like an afterthought, but my
shuto
—my knife hand—sent it skittering away.

Felt like blocking crowbars. Jeez, what did he do every morning with his forearms? Put them on a lathe?
Ow.

I heard quick footsteps in the distance—had to be Chen—and once more Gordon knew he had to cut and run. Well, at least I’d got the gun away from him.

I followed him down a side street.

Chatter of dialects coming from the main avenue, the noise of traffic, and someone hit me from behind, but it only rocked me a few steps forward. I got out of the way before a kick hit my lower spine, and as I swung around there was Jimmy.

His face as always was serene, his body poised in classical stance.

Gordon? Where was Gordon? I couldn’t take them both at once, and when Jimmy flicked his eyes nervously to the right, I knew Gordon wasn’t coming. Though I had lost him, Chen must have got him in his sights. Hoped so.

I put up my guard but tried anyway. “Jimmy, listen to me.”

“Please.”

As if he needed to do one of his submissive duties, changing me, washing me.

“Jimmy, the pills are laced with poison. Do you know that?
Fuck,
Jimmy! Do you give a damn?”

And as his fist shot out inches from my head and his kicks aimed for my ribs, he kept on saying, “Please…” I ducked back and then backed up some more. He sent a nasty side-thrust kick to my knee. “Please…”

Dodged it and jabbed him in the nose. “Now say thank you!” I barked.

Getting sick of this.

An Asian guy, pockmarked skin, white shirttails out, smoked calmly in the well of one of those loading shafts they have for stores here. Oh, no.

“Please…” The voice staying gentle.

It takes only one punch. Popped me right in the gut. Got behind me and did a sleeper hold—yeah, maybe they call it that, but it feels like blacking out for the rush of death.

Stupidly, my brain registered my heels dragging along the cement. Then the Chinese guy was helping Jimmy pull me into the basement of the shop, and the doors clanged shut. The hole in the ground closed. Chen wouldn’t have a clue if he rushed back into this alley.

I lost consciousness with the final thought: You’ve failed. You’ve failed them all—Anna, Craig, Oliver, Violet.
Violet.

I woke up to hands tearing and pulling my clothes off. Groggy, didn’t fight back until—

“Chain her!” barked Isaac.

I was in a dungeon. A larger, far better furnished one than Oliver’s. Soft-glow lights in fixtures to look like torches. Cages and a wooden rack. All of it disturbingly authentic. With the faithful standing around me, I could only assume I must be back in the mansion.

I kicked the first two guys that came my way, punched another one hard into next Wednesday, but there were
forty
of them. They didn’t even need to hit me. They just needed to close the distance like a swarm of ants. Five hands on each of my wrists, more bodies behind me kneeling to grab my legs, and it was hopeless, hopeless. I swore like a banshee; I actually tried to bite one of them. The silly fool liked it.

They shackled my wrists and ankles to a chain that was bolted to the stone wall. Enough slack in the chains that I could raise my arms a couple of feet above my head, part my legs a little to ground myself better and maybe step forward about five feet, but that was it. Just to be able to offer enough resistance to turn them on. Very medieval. And it scared the bloody hell out of me, I don’t mind saying now, though I did my best not to show it.