Perfect Strangers (43 page)

‘What did Uri want in return?’ asked Josh.

‘Shee-it, dawg, what you think?’ said Ty. ‘The money, of course. Everyone heard Mikey talking about hidden loot, so Uri would have offered to protect him for a cut of it.’

‘And Asner agreed?’

Ty laughed again. ‘Hey, maybe Mike suggested it. He told me he knew of at least a dozen people who wanted him dead: rich, powerful people, just the sort who could get to you in jail. Protection from someone like Uri was just what he wanted.’

The biker shrugged.

‘Besides, he had no fucking choice. Irony was, Uri was the one who cut his throat in the end.’

Josh and Sophie exchanged a look.

‘Why?’

‘Uri started piling on the pressure; he didn’t want to wait no more for the money.’

Sophie frowned.

‘So Asner didn’t have access to any money?’

‘Mikey told me he hid it with a friend, said he’d try to contact him. The morning he died, he was going for a meeting with Uri to stall him. I guess it turned sour – next thing I heard, I was getting a new cellie.’

‘So was Uri punished for it?’

Ty shook his head. ‘Two guys were sent to the hole, but they were Uri’s guys, lifers doin’ like three hundred years back to back. Whatcha gonna do to those guys?’

Sophie felt a curious mix of fear and relief. Fear because Uri the Bear was the kind of man who might cut your throat if he became impatient, but there was also a strange sense of relief that at last she knew who had been chasing her. Somehow it wasn’t so bad if you could put a name to the bogeyman.

‘Do you know who Asner’s friend was?’ asked Josh. ‘The one who was hiding the money?’

Ty shook his head. ‘Never gave me no name.’ He looked directly at Sophie. ‘But maybe he told Uri before he opened his neck.’

That was exactly what Sophie had been thinking. And another terrible thought had just occurred to her. If Asner had indeed given Uri Kaskov her father’s name, perhaps the Russian or his friends on the outside had contacted Peter Ellis – and perhaps that extra stress had contributed to his heart attack.

‘What else can you tell us about Uri?’ she asked.

Ty yawned and scratched his balls. It looked as if his patience was beginning to wear thin.

‘He’s a mobster. Moved down from Brighton Beach about fifteen years ago. He’s got a nightclub in South Beach, some strip joints, a couple of steak restaurants in Sunny Isles, all money-laundering fronts for other stuff. His son Sergei runs the operation now Uri’s inside.’

Ty wiggled his fingers at Josh.

‘Hey, funny man, gimme another butt before you go, huh? Story time’s over.’

Josh stood up and threw him the packet.

‘Here, you knock yourself out,’ he said. ‘We’ll find our own way out.’

Sophie found she was trembling as they stepped back out on to the street. Squinting in the sudden sunshine after the dimness of Ty’s flat, she peered up and down the road. They’d been chased by Uri’s men in London, the South of France, New York state. And now they had run straight into their back yard. She might as well have painted a target on her back, she thought as she looked around anxiously for the taxi.

‘The cabbie didn’t bloody wait,’ she cursed out loud.

‘Can’t say I blame him,’ said Josh. ‘Come on. No loitering, start walking. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.’

A white cab approached, and Josh dived into the road to hail it. He took Sophie’s hand and led her to the taxi, putting his arm protectively around her shoulders as they sat in the back seat and she rested her head against him.

‘So now we know who’s after me. But this is only going to stop when we find the money, and we’ve got nowhere else to go. This is the end of the trail.’ A tear trickled down her cheek and she wiped it away with the back of her thumb.

‘That’s not the Sophie Ellis I know,’ said Josh reassuringly. ‘Sophie Ellis doesn’t just give up. You’re a fighter. You’re not going to let these gangsters beat you, are you?’

‘But what can we do?’ she said, turning to him. ‘You can’t reason with these people, Josh. When they find out we don’t have the money, they’ll cut our throats too.’

‘They’re not going to touch a hair on your head.’

The way he said it – tender yet fierce, protective and strong – she almost believed it, and she was grateful for his words. But what good was one man against an army of Russian gangsters?

They lapsed into silence as they drove away from Ty’s neighbourhood and out on to the highway, the shops and offices giving way to motels, drive-thrus and Jiffy Lubes, whatever they were. When they had put enough distance between them and the ghetto, Josh leant over to the driver and asked him to pull into the lot of a diner.

‘Come on, we need to eat before we can plan our next move,’ he said. It was only when they pushed inside and smelled the sweet aroma of fresh waffles and bacon and coffee that Sophie realised how ravenous she was.

They sat in a booth at the end of the diner, with a view of the highway and the silvery gulf beyond, and quickly ordered an omelette for Sophie, and eggs over easy for Josh. The music was loud, old fifties rock ’n’ roll on the jukebox, and as she sipped at the black coffee the waitress had brought over, the normality of the situation make Sophie think more clearly.

‘If Uri killed Mike Asner, then maybe he killed Nick too.’

‘It’s possible,’ said Josh.

‘
Probable
,’ insisted Sophie. ‘You can see what’s happened here, can’t you? Uri’s men came to get me at the hotel and killed Nick when he wouldn’t tell them where I was.’

Josh gave a light, cynical snort.

‘What’s wrong with that theory?’

He looked unimpressed. ‘You’re still giving Nick the benefit of the doubt, aren’t you?’

‘
Benefit of the doubt
?’

‘A bit of distance, and now he’s this perfect romantic ideal of cheekbones and chivalry, giving up his life to save you.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘Sophie, this is a man who took money to seduce you and extract information so he and Lana could run off with a fortune. He’s dead, and that’s sad, but you shouldn’t be dreaming up these heroic scenarios for him.’

Sophie was about to object, but there was some truth in what he was saying. She didn’t want to accept that Nick was a coldhearted con man who had willingly and brutally torn her life apart.

‘All I’m saying is it’s one version of events that could have happened. And because of that, we should call Inspector Fox and tell him. Remember, I don’t want to be the only suspect in Nick’s murder, Josh.’

Looking up, she saw that Josh was tensed, his eyes darting around, on full alert.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked quietly.

‘I think we should leave,’ he said in a low voice, pulling a twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket and putting it calmly on the table. ‘There’s a fire exit to our left,’ he whispered. ‘When I say go, run for it.’

Sophie grabbed her bag in one hand and the glass sugar shaker in the other, ready to throw it. It was a pathetic, pointless defence, but if Uri’s men were coming for her, she was going to go down fighting.

‘Don’t get up on our account,’ said a voice. Sophie whirled around and found her exit blocked by a stern-looking man in his thirties. He had a regulation haircut and was wearing a dark sports jacket over a polo shirt. He didn’t
look
Russian.

Over his shoulder, she could see men in similar clothes standing by the door and the fire exit Josh had pointed out.

‘Miss Ellis, do you think you could put the sugar down?’ said the first man. ‘I would like to speak to both of you.’

She looked over at Josh, who let out a long breath and shrugged, sitting back down in the booth. Sophie followed his lead, placing her makeshift weapon back on the Formica tabletop.

‘Who are you?’ she said as the man squeezed in next to her.

‘My name is Hal Stanton. I’m a regional officer for the Securities and Exchange Commission.’

‘The SEC?’ Relief flooded her body; he wasn’t Russian, he wasn’t going to cut her throat, that was all she cared about in that moment.

‘You’ve heard of us then?’ said Stanton, holding up a finger to get a coffee from the waitress.

‘Can we see some identification?’ said Josh. The man pulled an ID card from his inside pocket and slid it across. Sophie looked down.

‘That’s not a good photo,’ she said.

Stanton gave a half-smile. ‘I guess some of us just aren’t photogenic.’

The waitress brought Stanton his coffee and he sipped it. He didn’t seem in much of a hurry.

‘So I take it you’re in charge of tracking down the Michael Asner money?’ said Sophie.

‘Not exactly,’ said Stanton. ‘I’m just one cog in the machine. A man named Thomas Fallon is the court-appointed trustee; he’s in charge of hunting down and allocating funds to the victims. Your family has probably heard from him. But we’re involved, yes.’

‘What do you know about my family?’ said Sophie.

‘Enough,’ said Stanton, looking at her over his coffee.

‘How did you find us here?’

Hal Stanton gave a soft snort. ‘Do you think it’s coincidence that Ty Connor was released from prison four weeks after Asner got killed?’

‘You’ve been tracking him,’ said Josh, shaking his head, as if he should have worked it out sooner. ‘You wanted to see if Asner told him anything, see if he tried to dig up the buried treasure. And then you saw us walk into his apartment.’

‘Something like that,’ said Stanton. ‘But as it happens, I was also tipped off by Andrea Sayer. She reckoned we should meet.’

Sophie had guessed the lawyer would have called the authorities. If Andrea had told Stanton about their visit, she’d presumably told them everything else.

‘Have you found Benedict Grear yet?’ she asked.

Stanton shook his head. ‘I was hoping
you
had.’

‘No,’ said Josh. ‘Ty Connor was our only lead – and he says he’s never heard of Grear.’ He gave a cynical smile. ‘But then you already know that, don’t you?’

‘We know everything, Mr McCormack,’ smirked Stanton. ‘That’s our job.’

‘Oh yeah? So where’s the money, then?’

The smile drained from the agent’s face.

‘This is one of the biggest fraud inquiries in US history, not some free-for-all Easter egg hunt.’

‘Some of that money belongs to my family, Mr Stanton,’ said Sophie evenly.

‘You sure about that?’ he replied.

Sophie swallowed. Was Stanton telling her he knew about her father’s involvement in the scam? No, he couldn’t – if the federal agencies knew about Peter Ellis’s role as the ‘bag man’, as Josh put it, they would have shut down Sophie and her mother just as they had done with Miriam Asner. They would have seized assets, frozen accounts, gone through their homes with sniffer dogs and X-ray machines. What Stanton was doing was warning them off.

‘Is that a threat?’ she said.

Stanton shrugged.

‘Take it any way you like, Miss Ellis. All I’m saying is that the stakes are high in this case. If you want to have any hope of going back to London and living a quiet life, I suggest you co-operate with us in every way possible.’

‘That does sound like a threat,’ said Josh.

‘So sue us,’ said Stanton with a twisted smile. ‘In the meantime, perhaps you could tell us everything else Mr Ellis found out about the Asner case.’

Sophie repeated the version of the story she had given to Andrea Sayer, the one where her father was playing amateur detective in the slim hope of recovering some of his investment, all the time becoming more and more convinced that Josh was right: she had to keep going, had to get to that money before the authorities, before the Russians, because without it they had nothing.

‘So you’re sure that’s all you know?’ said Stanton when she had finished. ‘Just a random name your father had written down in a file?’

‘My father was an accountant, not a policeman, Mr Stanton,’ said Sophie. ‘He had no real idea if Asner had hidden that money, it was just a hunch.’

‘A hunch,’ repeated Stanton.

‘Yes. I know it sounds stupid,’ said Sophie, ‘but we lost everything to that man. My mother is having to sell our family home. I thought my children would play on the garden swing just like I did, but Michael Asner took that from us. So excuse my father if he was clutching at straws – he was just trying to get back what was ours.’

She could hear the words coming out of her mouth but she could barely believe it was her. Was she morphing into Josh, she asked herself, able to weave a line, a story at the drop of a hat? What was it that Andrea Sayer had said back in New York?
If they find out you have been withholding information, they will find a way to hurt you
.

But she couldn’t stop now. She met Stanton’s gaze directly.

‘Please, Hal. Find the money. I can’t speak for the rest of Asner’s victims, but it killed my father and now it’s broken my mother.’

Hal Stanton nodded and handed her a business card. ‘Do you have a number I can reach you on?’

She wrote her own mobile number on a napkin, knowing her phone was sitting waterlogged in Josh’s lock-up.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said, getting up. ‘And kids? Please stop with the Scooby-Doo shit, okay? If we catch you on our turf again, we won’t be so nice.’

They watched as he left, followed by the other anonymously dressed men, and got into the black town car in the parking lot.

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Sophie, cupping her hands around her cheeks. Josh put his finger to his lips. ‘Don’t speak,’ he mouthed. ‘Let’s go.’

They walked outside into the hot, humid air. The town car had gone. Josh led her away from the diner into the car park, where the noise from the highway would stop anyone from overhearing them.

Her heart was pounding. ‘Oh my God, Josh, what have I done?’ she said, struggling for breath. ‘I’ve just spent the last ten minutes lying to a government agent.’

‘You did well,’ said Josh.

‘Well?’ she stammered. ‘The Commission has resources. How difficult is it going to be for him to find out I’m not poor Miss Innocent-Michael-Asner-Victim and that I’ve been questioned in connection with the death of a high-profile American in London?’