The Anonymous Source (17 page)

ALEX AWOKE
AT 3 A.M.
and looked around the hotel room. There were two double beds and a small desk. Above the desk, a window looked out on the stairway and courtyard. Brown curtains framed French doors that led onto a small balcony facing the ocean, now illuminated by silver moonlight. Along the wall, a long dresser held an old TV.

“Crap,” Alex whispered. There was no coffee maker.

Camila was asleep on the bed in the corner. Alex found the safe in the closet and locked up the recordings of his conversation with Downton and the USB drive James had given Camila. Next, he quietly dressed and left the room, then took the stairs down to the courtyard. The hotel lobby was open and the concierge on duty gave him a cup of coffee and directions to the business center, a ten by ten beige room with a row of old PCs.

First, he sent an e-mail to Baxton, telling him that he needed to take a leave of absence for at least a week. He tried to sound professional, despite the fact that he filled with rage every time he thought about his boss. Then he did a web search for Macintosh Hollinger and spent two hours reading everything he could find.

By 6 a.m., Alex was on the beach wearing a pair of Hawaiian shorts the concierge had lent him from the lost and found. The first streaks of pink were appearing in the sky and the day was warming. He left his clothes and shoes in the sand and started at a slow jog past cabanas and palm trees, picking up speed as he passed the last hotel and entered a long stretch of empty beach.

He tried to think about Hollinger and Bice, but instead thought about Camila. What was it about her? And why did he feel like he was being erased? As the dread pooled in his stomach, he laughed out loud at the fact that the dread was not related to the man who had rummaged through his apartment twenty-four hours earlier, but to his feelings for Camila.

Every eight minutes or so he stopped to do pushups in the sand. After an hour, he had completed a seven-mile loop and 150 pushups.

* * *

Camila sat on a plastic chair on the shady balcony and looked out at the ocean. She watched a giant turtle crawl off a rock into the water, then rise and fall with the waves. She felt the cool, wet air move through her nostrils and fill her belly. She looked down at her phone, balanced on the arm of the chair. Her mother would call again soon.

She closed her eyes and pictured Alex—stretching at the airport, making fun of himself. She imagined the crunchy bits of macadamia nut from the night before, the tiny bubbles from the champagne, and saw Alex smiling as she’d leaned in to kiss him. Then her father appeared, sitting in his old recliner, watching football as her mother shuffled from room to room. She remembered the way he spoke to her mother. His cruel words. His cold, bitter tone.

She felt the wind on her face and the cold plastic chair through her pants. She saw her father and felt a sting on her face, then an aching. Her whole body stiffened, contracted. Her head was warm and relaxed, her mind clear, but in her body she felt a creeping sickness, an unspeakable sadness. Like something was fundamentally wrong with her, without cause.

She was no longer aware of the wind or the sea. She wanted to get up, but instead focused on the sensation. In it she felt all her father’s bitterness and anger. She adjusted her legs, but the awareness stayed. “Cam, what are you
doing
?” Her father’s voice echoed in her, stabbed at her chest. His tone seemed to carry with it generations of cruelty.

She heard the door of the hotel room open. Alex’s voice came softly through the room. “Honey, I’m home.”

WHEN ALEX
SAW HER
sitting on the balcony, he walked through the room and out the sliding door. Her body was still, which made him feel uncomfortable. “Is everything okay?”

“Fine,” she said, turning toward him. She burst out laughing when she saw him. He still wore the borrowed shorts and was covered in sand-speckled sweat.

“You look like a commercial for Hawaii,” she said. “Where are your clothes?”

“Left them down in the changing room by the pool. Concierge lent me these.”

“Have you eaten? Wait, lemmee guess. You swam out, caught a baby shark, built a fire out of driftwood, then grilled it on the beach for a tasty, low-carb option?”

Alex smiled and wiped the sweat from his chest with a towel he’d grabbed from the bathroom. “You’re just making fun of me because you’ve probably never seen a shirtless younger man up close.”

Camila glared at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t mean it that way. Look, the breakfast buffet is open downstairs. Let’s eat and I’ll tell you about Hollinger.”

“Ok, but please put some regular clothes on first.”

* * *

They piled their plates high at a forty-foot buffet of standard American breakfast foods—sausage, bacon, eggs, pancakes—and local foods like mango, pineapple, and crab legs. Camila led them to a table in the corner, and they sat overlooking a courtyard dotted with cedar planters filled with flowers and miniature palm trees.

Alex had read several bios of Hollinger and many flattering profiles in finance and investment magazines. He told her Hollinger’s story as they ate.

“Mr. Hollinger was born on a New Jersey dairy farm on September 11, 1917, died on his eighty-fourth birthday. His dad went to fight in Germany just before he was born and never came back, so he was raised by his mom and three older brothers until he left for Princeton in 1933. Went there early, it looks like. His mother and brothers are all deceased and he has two kids from a previous marriage, both of whom live in California.”

“From a farm to Princeton?” Camila poured syrup over pineapple pancakes that were already drenched in butter.

“From what I could tell, they weren’t exactly farmers. They owned a large dairy operation, over a thousand acres, that sold milk wholesale to cheese makers. Anyway, his mom ran the business after his dad died. So, he goes to Princeton, majors in math, graduates in ‘37, and finishes an MA there in 1940. Spent World War II breaking codes for the Navy. Gets out of the Navy in ‘47 and decides to teach the world about math, about why numbers matter.”

“So how’d he get so rich?”

“Hold on a sec.” Alex walked to the buffet and returned with a plate covered in crab legs.

“That much crab would cost two hundred dollars in the City.”

“I know. I’m thinking about moving here.”

“So how’d he get so rich?”

Alex cracked a giant crab leg and dipped the meat in salted lemon juice. “At some point, he started investing a little of his family’s money. They didn’t have a ton, but enough extra during the boom of the fifties that they needed to do something with it. So he’s hopping around between crappy teaching jobs and he starts to invest little pieces of his family’s money. He lands a tenure-track job at Tulane in 1956. Taught there for fifteen years and left in ‘71 to start his own investing firm. Weird thing was, he was already rich. He was investing the whole time at Tulane. The financial magazines describe him as a pioneer. In the sixties and seventies, he used advanced math in his investing before anyone else. Used computers to design trades before the first computer appeared in the New York Stock Exchange.”

“So he was some sort of genius?” Camila asked.

“Basically, yeah. Just made trades based on numbers, which everyone does now. I don’t really understand it, but it worked. By the time he set up his own firm in ‘71, he had some
very
rich
clients. Plus, he already had a personal fortune of over fifty million.”

Camila nibbled a slice of watermelon. “Anything that helps explain the interaction at the funeral? What could John have meant when he said it was lucky Hollinger died when he did?”

“Well, we already knew that Martin, Hollinger, and Bice were all at Tulane at the same time. But I did find out that a good chunk of Hollinger’s fortune came from an early investment in Standard Media. Ended up owning ten percent of their stock, more than five hundred million’s worth. So that’s a connection with Bice. But who knows what it means?”

Camila wiped her watermelon in a pool of syrup. “Mac’s wife might.”

BACK IN
THEIR ROOM
, they checked the phone book for Sonia Hollinger but found nothing. Alex flipped open his phone and called James Stacy at home. James picked up on the first ring as Camila flopped down on the bed.

“Waiting by the phone?” Alex asked.

“Actually, y-yes. Where the hell are you?”

“We’ve been in transit.”

“We?”

“I mean, I.”

“What’s going on?”

“Calm down, James. I need some help.”

“More h-help? I’m already freaking out that I helped you with that video.”

Alex walked to the balcony and stared at the beach. “James, calm down. Can you do research from home? I mean, do you have access to all the same stuff you have at the office?”

“Most of it, bu—”

“I need you to look something up.”

“I’m not d-doing another thing until you t-tell me what’s going on.”

Alex held his hand over the phone. “He wants to know what’s going on,” he whispered to Camila.

She sat up in bed and nodded. Alex told James about the video, Baxton squashing his story, and the man in their apartments. “We’re in Kona,” he concluded.

James coughed into the phone. “I’m not involving myself in this any-m-m-m-m—” He cleared his throat. “Anymore.”

“You’re already involved,” Alex said. “Please, we just need an address or phone number for Sonia Hollinger in Kona.”

“Aren’t you a reporter? Can’t you go d-down to the town hall or something?”

“We don’t want anyone to know we’re looking for her.”

James sighed. “Give me a half hour.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Alex said. He hung up.

Camila lay on her back across the bed. “I feel like I’m in a sugar coma.”

Alex lay on his belly beside her, his feet dangling off the bottom of the bed. “Let’s think about this, Cam. What do we know?”

“Cam? So we’re doing nicknames for each other now?”

Alex pressed the nail of his index finger into his thumb then flicked her leg. “
You’re
the one who held my hand on the plane,” he said. “
And
leaned toward me
flirtatiously last night.”

She rolled away from him onto her elbow. “That was a mistake. I’m really not . . . I mean . . . it’s not a good idea.”

Alex stood up and walked to the window. “I could use another call from that source,” he said after staring at the beach for a minute.

“What about your list? Read me a few names.”

Alex took the list from his bag. “Well, Bearon eliminated five names. I called a few. About seventy are left. Brian Adler, officer on the NYU beat. Simone Bryant, assistant DA for Manhattan County. You’re not gonna know any of these people.”

“You’re probably right.”

Alex scanned the list, then looked up. “Weird.”

“What?”

“James put the names of the prosecutors on here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he put Davis, Morganthal, and Sharp on here. The three lead prosecutors in the Santiago trial.”

“You asked him for everyone who would have access to the file, right?”

“Yeah, but I figured he would eliminate people who obviously aren’t my source.”

“Did you ask him to do that?”

“Well, no.”

Camila walked over and took the list. “Wait, that could fit,” she said. “If Santiago is innocent, they are likely to know it. Maybe one of them has a guilty conscience.”

“That’s pretty farfetched. They’re putting all their energy into
prosecuting
the guy. Why would they leak information to sabotage their own case?”

“Think about it,” Camila said. “You said Sharp wants to run for mayor, right? Maybe he wants the case to get even bigger. Even if he loses, if it’s not his fault, it won’t matter. The more press the trial gets, the bigger his profile gets. For better or worse, he’d become a national figure.”

“Maybe. But if it’s him, he’ll never go on record. He’d be disbarred. Finished.”

“That’s why he’d go to great lengths—like a voice scrambler—to make sure he stays anonymous.”

“Let’s stick with what we know, okay? I need to get this straight before we meet with Sonia.”

“
If
we meet with Sonia,” Camila said, dropping the list on the bed and sitting down.

“We know the guy from the sketch killed Demarcus and rifled through my apartment, probably looking for the recording. But why didn’t he rifle through your apartment?”

“Maybe he heard Charlie next door and looked through everything quietly. Or maybe he was just waiting for us there and left when we didn’t come home.”

Alex closed the curtains, then opened them again. He closed his left eye and focused on a pair of surfers far out on the waves. “And if the bartender is right, we know the killer was in the bar on New Year’s Eve. So somehow that night he dosed Martin’s drink with fentanyl, probably while he was in the restroom.”

“That would explain the wobbling and shaking on the video.”

“Right,” Alex said. “So he gets to the park as the fentanyl hits. He leans on the statue. Santiago walks through the park, stops, and watches him die.”

“Any chance Santiago was somehow in on it, and is taking the fall?”

“I don’t know, but he seems like a pretty weird kid. Seems like the kinda kid who could’ve done it.”

“That’s not exactly how these things are supposed to be decided,” Camila said.

“Well, he had the drug in his apartment.”

“Yeah, but lots of students get fake prescriptions.” Camila walked over to Alex and looked out at the surfers.

“So if Santiago had nothing to do with it,” he said, “we’re back to motive. My source said we need to figure out
why
Martin was killed, that there are three dead, not two. It’s possible that refers to Hollinger, but it’s quite possible it doesn’t.” Alex paused. “Plus, Hollinger died in 9/11. How could his death be linked to anything else?”

Camila went back, sat on the bed, and closed her eyes.

Alex watched her. “What?” he asked. “I can tell you’re thinking something.”

“I’m just thinking about that interaction John had with Bice at the funeral. Maybe John knew something Bice didn’t want him to know. Something connected to Hollinger.”

“That would tie them together, but we need to talk with Hollinger’s wife.” Alex paced the room.

“What are you thinking now?” Camila asked.

“Before we ran out of your apartment, you said that Martin kept everything. Do you have an assistant? Anyone who can send you Martin’s papers?”

“I can get Charlie to do it. He’s got a spare key.”

“What about e-mails? Can we get his e-mails?”

“John rarely e-mailed, and when he did, it was just for work. He didn’t even have a personal e-mail account.”

Camila called Charlie and explained where she was. Next, she asked him to send all the files from the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet, plus the letters Martin had written her, which were in her desk drawer. “Everything should be here Saturday,” she said when she hung up.

Alex’s phone rang and he looked at the caller ID. “It’s James,” he said, flipping it open. “What happened to fifteen minutes?”

“Rich p-people are harder to find.”