Stripped (44 page)

“Why not? You say you don’t owe Blake, but you sure as hell owe me.”

“I know I do, but you can’t ask me that, Claire. You can’t.”

Claire looked as if she would explode in frustration. If the gun were still in her hand, Serena thought, she would have killed Boni. Or herself. Or both. She turned away, and her shoulders wrenched as she sobbed.

Boni closed his eyes. His daughter’s pain seemed to stab him and open up old wounds. “It was him, Claire,” he said quietly. “Back then. With Amira.”

Claire swung back in disbelief. “No.”

Boni nodded. “That was when it started between him and me. I made him. Like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster.”

“
Mickey
killed Amira?”

Boni’s face contorted as if Claire had thrown open Pandora’s box and all the demons had flown out and scattered. As if, by saying the name, she had taken the gun and shot him.

Serena’s mind raced, and she mouthed the word at Stride.
Mickey
?

Claire stepped forward and slapped him across the face, so hard that the old man lost his balance. “You knew what kind of monster he was. How could you let him near me? How could you ask me to go out with him?”

“So much time had passed, Claire. I thought he was different. I thought I could trust him.”

“He’s still more important to you than I am, isn’t he? After all these years. Of course he is. This is still about the empire. The Orient. The capstone to your life, and every brick of it built on suffering and violence and death.”

“Stop it, Claire.”

Claire shouted in his face, her lip curling in contempt. “
Mickey
! That’s our big secret, Daddy. He’s been hung around your neck—and mine—for forty years.”

Boni shook his head. “He’s still there, Claire. This doesn’t change a thing. You know that.”

“Yes, it does. It’s over. There’s going to be a trial. Blake’s trial. It’s all going to come out. Amira. Mickey. You. Everything.”

“I can’t let that happen.”

“It’s out of your control now.”

Boni’s voice was weary. “Nothing is out of my control, Claire.”

He reached into the back pocket of his pants and pulled out a pack of European cigarettes. He slid one into his hand and then hunted in another pocket and emerged with an oldfashioned Zippo lighter.

“Nothing,” he said.

He flicked the lighter, and even in the wind, it threw up a tiny flame.

A second later, on the ledge, Blake jerked up like a toy dancer jolted with electricity, his eyes growing wide. Serena saw him stagger in confusion. A stain of red opened up on his shirt, dripping in trails down his chest. Another instant later, the sound wave of a distant crack rolled across the terrace. Blake seemed to fold in on himself. He sagged, his face went pale, and he vanished backward on the long fall that led to the parking lot below.

Stride knew they had problems when no one took their statements on the roof.

It was a crime scene. Shots had been fired. A man, however evil, however many others he had killed, lay dead on the ground far below them. Deliberately murdered. They should be spilling their guts now, explaining what happened and how it happened for the inevitable investigation and trial to follow.

It didn’t work out that way.

Sawhill arrived and took charge of the crime scene personally, which meant, for the most part, keeping people out. He spent the first twenty minutes talking to Boni Fisso, not his own détectives. The two men hugged like old friends. That was the first bad sign. Then Sawhill asked a uniformed officer to take Claire home to her apartment. Not Serena. Not Stride. Claire looked longingly back at the two of them but allowed herself to be led away.

“You two,” Sawhill finally said. “Why don’t you go get some sleep?”

The next bad sign.

“You need our statements,” Stride protested blandly.

“It can wait until tomorrow. You’ve both had a hell of a night. Job well done. You got a mass murderer off the street. Now get out of here, and we’ll talk in the morning.”

Sawhill smiled at them, trying to act like the proud parent, but Stride knew it was a politician’s smile. He was in damage control mode. The whitewash was coming down, painting over the sins, preparing to detonate them once and for all next week along with the Sheherezade. Stride was too tired to complain. The bandaged flesh wound on his calf was throbbing. He hurt all over. He was happy to leave.

He and Serena went home. They didn’t have the energy to talk. They fell into bed and were soon unconscious, and the only sensation that managed to penetrate Stride’s brain was that the tangled sheets smelled like Claire’s perfume. He drifted away and had erotic dreams that were interrupted by violence, by people falling, by screams of rape.

They slept for ten hours.

It was early afternoon when they made it into the station. There was a buzz of exhilaration inside the building. Case solved. Cops came up to clap them on the back and congratulate them. High fives all around.
Blake took a dive. Way to go
. Sawhill was there, too, still smiling as he ushered them into his office. It was the same politician’s smile he had worn last night, and Stride knew they were about to be rolled.

As he closed the door, Sawhill said the unthinkable to his assistant. “Hold my calls.”

Stride and Serena settled into the chairs in front of Sawhill’s desk. The lieutenant didn’t pick up his stress ball; he seemed to be stress-free today. “Congratulations, both of you,” he told them. “Governor Durand asked me to extend his personal thanks.”

They didn’t reply.

“I don’t need to tell you how sorry I am about Amanda,” Sawhill continued. “But you got the guy. Good for you. And the taxpayers don’t have to pay his room and board for the next forty years. Even better.”

“Who’s running the investigation now?” Stride asked.

“What investigation?”

“Into Blake’s death.”

“Oh, we wrapped that up last night,” Sawhill replied. His smile grew wider, as if it were his nose growing longer.

“Wrapped it up?” Stride asked. “Who killed him?”

“The head of Boni’s security agency. David Kamen. He’s a sharpshooter, as you’ll recall. Fortunately, Boni thought to take precautions when Blake called him, and he had Kamen take position in the Charlcombe Towers opposite the Sheherezade.”

Stride nodded. He had figured that. “Is Boni under arrest?”

Sawhill looked shocked. “Whatever for?”

“He had Blake killed. This was an assassination. Blake was
secure
, sir. Boni gave a green flag for Kamen to kill him, because he didn’t want dirt coming out at Blake’s trial about Amira’s death.”

“You’re mistaken, Detective. I talked to Kamen personally last night. He had Blake under his scope the entire time, and he shot him when Blake began reaching for a backup gun he had in an ankle holster.”

“Blake never moved,” Stride said.

“Are you absolutely sure about that? I understand you were focused on Boni and Claire at the time. Good thing Kamen was there, Detective. This could have been another mistake on your part. A fatal one. Blake could have had his gun out and taken you both out in less than a second.”

Stride frowned. He couldn’t swear in court that his attention hadn’t wavered, at least for a second, during the confrontation between Boni and Claire. A tiny space of time was all Blake would have needed.

Except it was a lie. They all knew it.

“We found a gun on the ground near the body,” Sawhill continued. “A Walther. Small but deadly. Blake still had the holster strapped to his ankle.”

Isn’t that convenient
? Stride thought. “So that’s it?” he asked.

“That’s it.”

“Who’s Mickey?” Stride asked. He watched Sawhill’s eyes but couldn’t read anything in the man’s level stare.

“Mickey? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What about Amira?” Stride persisted.

Sawhill smiled. “Like I told you at the very beginning, Detective, Amira Luz was killed by a deranged fan.”

Stride lit a cigarette. Serena looked at him, frowning. They sat in a park a few blocks from the station. It was late afternoon. The heat wave had finally broken, and the October sunshine felt like another day in paradise. Midseventies, endless blue sky. The smog was taking a day off, leaving the mountains sharp and crisp on the horizon.

He was half hooked again, and he knew it. The smoke in his lungs felt like an old friend he had missed. He didn’t look back at Serena. “I wouldn’t say anything if you had a drink,” he said.

“Like hell. You’d rip it out of my hand and pour the bottle down the sink.”

“Okay, yeah, I would,” he admitted.

Serena reached over and grabbed the cigarette from his lips. She flicked it to the ground and crushed it under her foot. A few embers fizzled in the dirt. Stride felt an immediate longing and wondered if he could win the war twice.

“You haven’t asked anything about me and Claire,” Serena said. She squinted into the sun, and Stride saw her tongue flick over her dry lips.

“That’s true,” Stride replied flatly. It had been in and out of his thoughts all day. The sweet aroma of Claire in their bed. But he wasn’t going to say anything. He waited, needing a cigarette.

“I get it,” Serena said. “It’s up to me. Tell you or not tell you. A lot of guys couldn’t live without knowing.”

“I’m not saying I can,” Stride said.

She stuthed her fingernails and looked incredibly nervous.

“We had sex,” Serena told him.

The words hung there between them, and Stride tried to read Serena’s face. She was embarrassed. Guilty. Scared. Proud.

“I mean, we were going to have sex,” she rushed on. “Blake interrupted before anything could really happen. But that doesn’t matter. We had started. I was going to let her make love to me. I was going to make love to her. That’s the truth.”

She wanted him to tell her everything was all right. He hoped the blankness on his own face didn’t register as disapproval.

“Are you going to say something?” Serena asked.

Stride said the first thing that occurred to him. “I have a raging hard-on.”

Serena burst out laughing. Stride did, too. When the laughter died away, she kissed him hard and then whispered, “What about the rest of you?”

“It doesn’t change anything for me. The real question is you.”

“I feel like I purged a demon. But I was afraid I’d lose you because of it.”

“That wasn’t going to happen.”

“I’m sorry,” she told him.

“You don’t need to be, not for this.”

“I need to tell Claire the truth. Let her down gently.”

“Have you talked to her?” Stride asked.

Serena shook her head. “I’m worried. I tried her home, her cell phone, the club. Nothing. I don’t know where she is.”

“Boni has her under wraps.”

“That’s what scares me.”

“I don’t think he’d actually harm her” Stride said.

“No? He killed his own son. I don’t want her winding up as a so-called suicide. ‘My daughter was upset, couldn’t handle the stress,’ that kind of shit.”

“You really care about her.”

Serena hesitated. “Yes, I do. I could love her. But I don’t.”

Stride was surprised at the depth of relief he felt, hearing her say those words. “She wanted the truth to come out. Now it’s probably not going to. Can Claire live with that?”

“Boni won’t give her a choice.”

“How about us? Can we live with the whitewash?”

Serena shrugged. “It’s not thefirsttime, is it?”

Stride heard and understood the message. They had resolved the murder of Rachel Deese, the case that had brought them together, in a way that left part of the truth hidden. At Stride’s request. It was their secret.

“Sometimes politics and money win out, Jonny,” she added.

“In Vegas?”

“Everywhere.”

“The bigger question is whether he’ll let
us
live,” Stride said. “We heard things we weren’t supposed to hear.”

“Mickey.”

“Exactly. Whoever he is, he’s at the heart of Boni’s power.”

“But he must have been a kid back then,” Serena said.

“Helen Truax said he was a pool boy. A lifeguard, looking to get lucky with gamblers’ wives. Maybe he tried to seduce Amira, and things got out of hand.”

Serena shook her head. “No way. He was with Amira because Boni wanted him there. He called Rucci when the job was done. The fight story was just a ruse.”

“And from that day forward, Boni owned his soul,” Stride said. He took out his cell phone and began dialing. “Let’s find out who the bastard is.”

“Helen didn’t know.”

“Maybe Moose will.”

Stride heard the big comedian’s voice on the phone, and he reintroduced himself. Moose began to fall all over himself, congratulating Stride on catching Tierney’s killer. Stride let the man gush. He could imagine his eyebrows dancing with joy.

“I have a question for you,” Stride said when Moose finally took a breath.