The Key (17 page)

W
e hit the floor in a tangle: Andrew, the mysterious stranger, and me.

My fingers scrambled for purchase on the slippery nylon of Andrew’s windbreaker. “Stop,” I pleaded. “You don’t want to do this.”

“I have to do this,” he said between clenched teeth. “And I don’t want to hurt you, so let go.”

He shook me off and raised his arm, pointing the gun toward the dais again.

Then I saw the mysterious stranger’s hand descend, chopping fiercely at Andrew’s wrist. He gave a shout of pain and dropped the gun. I kicked at it, sending it spinning down the cold concrete floor.

Andrew struggled to his feet, intent on recovering the weapon. The stranger and I both leaped to tackle him, but he was too fast. My arms closed around empty air, and I hit the floor again, but this time the stranger cushioned my impact.

The audience finally started to react. Somebody grabbed Andrew’s gun, and a couple of people grabbed Andrew.

On the dais, the board of directors began cautiously emerging from the chairs they’d dived behind, and Perry pulled himself up from where he’d ducked behind the podium. He was clutching at his arm. It was a good thing that I couldn’t see that well, as I had a feeling there was blood involved, and I’d gotten more than my fill of gore seeing to the mysterious stranger’s cut the night before last.

“Are you okay up there?” asked the mysterious stranger. His voice was surprisingly deep.

“What? Oh. Sorry.” I rolled off him.

Wordlessly, he helped me up before melting into the crowd.

Andrew was confessing to Gallagher’s murder even as the authorities led him away, assuring them and everyone else within earshot that he wouldn’t rest until Perry and Brisbane were also six feet under. We found out later that his brother, Bobby, had made a similar attempt on the good senator’s life that very morning, intercepting Brisbane outside of his Washington home. An off-duty Secret Service agent on his morning run had jogged by at just the right time—at least, the right time for Brisbane. Otherwise, the brothers would have been two for three.

Their original plot had been much more elaborate than what eventually played out, the product of more than a year of careful planning. Just as Andrew had insinuated himself into Gallagher’s workplace, Bobby had recently secured an internship in Senator Brisbane’s office. They intended to make their respective employers’ deaths look like accidents before moving on to Perry.

But once Perry launched the Thunderbolt buyout, they had to scrap their careful plans. They couldn’t let Perry and his cronies do to other families what had been done to theirs. They were willing to sacrifice their futures to avenge their mother’s death, but there were three targets, and only two of them. They had to kill one of the men on their list without being caught so that they could remain free long enough to finish the job.

They were fortunate in that there was a long line of people who wanted to kill Gallagher, and Andrew improvised a murder that could have been committed by a number of them. This left the brothers free to kill Brisbane and Perry in parallel, at which point they would confess to the Gallagher murder, as well.

The irony, of course, was that their only successful murder was the one for which they didn’t want to be caught. Killing people should have been a lot easier when they weren’t concerned about the consequences.

Peter and I spent the rest of the morning and a significant chunk of the early afternoon making statements to the police. They seemed willing to suspend my fugitive status now they had the real killer in custody, and by midafternoon we’d said goodbye to the extended Kryzluk family and were back in Luisa’s car, heading east on the Interstate. This time Peter knew better than to order a salad at the McDonald’s drive-through.

Traffic was light, and the weather was clear, so the drive back was pleasant and relatively quick. We’d called from the road to update my friends, and they were waiting for us in my apartment. They’d also already ordered dinner.

Over the past several days I’d eaten Big Macs, pierogies, bacon, sausage, pancakes, coffee cake, various forms of fried potatoes (including several bags of salt-and-vinegar chips), enchiladas, guacamole, pad thai, spring rolls, and lasagna. At this point a normal person would probably be craving vegetables, or at least liposuction.

Fortunately, I wasn’t normal, and I’d squeezed in a number of unintended workouts escaping from the police and assorted other pursuers. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to do justice to the samosas and curry that arrived shortly after Peter and me.

“Anybody want a beer?” Hilary called out from the kitchen.

“You told her to say that,” Peter accused me.

I gave him my sweetest and most innocent smile.

We all took our plates into the living room, where Peter and I recounted everything that had happened since we’d last checked in.

“Was it like
The Bodyguard,
only you were Kevin Costner and Perry was Whitney Houston?” asked Hilary.

“And what is a pierogie, exactly?” asked Jane. She’d never lived anywhere but Boston, and her exposure to Eastern European cuisine had been limited, although she could probably discourse at length on clam chowder and baked beans.

“There’s something I don’t get,” said Emma after the topics of Kevin Costner and pierogies had been thoroughly exhausted. “Why would Andrew attack Dahlia?”

I turned to her. “That’s exactly what Peter and I were wondering. And we don’t think he did. I mean, Andrew’s small enough that he could pass for me if he was dressed in the right outfit, so he probably
could
have done it, but that doesn’t explain why he would do it in the first place, much less why he would try to frame me. Meanwhile, the police seem ready to blame him, given that they let me completely off the hook.”

“This Andrew person and his brother—their actions were fairly principled,” mused Luisa. “In a somewhat twisted way, but still principled. Some might even find their reason for killing Gallagher honorable given the context. But that wouldn’t extend to killing Dahlia, would it?”

“Even if it did, it still doesn’t add up,” said Peter. “Why would Andrew care if Dahlia had realized something fishy was going on with the Thunderbolt deal? If anything, he would have welcomed it. But how could he even know what Dahlia suspected?”

“Which brings us back to Jake and Annabel,” I said. “Which also brings us back to the fact that Jake tried to shoot me at the boat basin.”

“Rach, you’re practically blind,” Hilary said. “Are you absolutely sure Jake was shooting at you?”

“And if you’re practically blind, why did you assure me that you were fine to drive my car?” added Luisa pointedly.

“It was Jake at the boat basin. I’m sure of that. And it was Mark—I mean, Andrew—who rescued me from him. There’s only one possible explanation. Jake and Annabel may not have killed Gallagher, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t jump at the opportunity to make the most out of his death.” I explained my theory about the likely terms of Annabel’s prenuptial agreement. “The Thunderbolt deal had to go forward, at least if the two of them wanted to make sure they would have sufficient ill-gotten gains on which to live happily ever after. They wouldn’t want to have to work for the rest of their lives, would they?”

“Did you tell the police about this?” asked Jane.

I shook my head. “I tried, but as far as they were concerned, they had a confessed killer and his brother on the hook. They weren’t terribly interested in my theories.”

The phone rang just then—not my BlackBerry, which I’d long since given up any hope of recovering from the tourist’s backpack—but my home phone.

“Should I get that?” asked Peter. He consulted the caller ID on the handset. “It says Private Caller.”

“Why don’t we let the machine get it? Everyone I’d want to talk to is already here.”

“How sweet,” said Hilary dryly.

We could hear the answering machine from the study, and my voice inviting callers to leave a message. Then we could hear the caller leaving his message.

“Rachel, Jake here.”

His tone was friendly. Like it never would have occurred to him to frame me for murder, much less try to kill me.

“Speak of the devil,” said Jane.

“It’s been a crazy couple of days, hasn’t it? I still can’t get over the news about Mark Anders. I heard that it was you who managed to get the gun away from him at the shareholders’ meeting—nice work! I didn’t even recognize you, and then I guess I missed you after. It was quite a scene. Give me a call when you get a chance. I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“The nerve of that guy!” said Peter. This was rapidly becoming his standard response to all matters involving Jake.

“He doesn’t know that we know what we know,” I told him. “But he probably wants to find out if we do know what we know, so that he can know if he needs to worry about what we know.”

“When you put it like that, I don’t know if
we
know what we know,” said Luisa. She had opened both the window and the screen and was now perched on the sill, the hand with her cigarette held carefully outside.

“Luisa, you’re making me very nervous,” Jane said. “We’re fifteen flights up.”

“Actually, only fourteen. There’s no thirteenth floor,” I said.

Luisa just shrugged and exhaled a stream of smoke into the air above 79th Street.

“How do children in New York learn to count, anyhow?” asked Jane.

“While we’re on the subject of what we know, or don’t know, or wherever we were, what about the mysterious stranger in the suede jacket?” asked Emma.

“That’s right,” said Hilary. “What about Mr. Mysterious? Who is he?”

“And why does he keep showing up everywhere and then disappearing again?” asked Jane.

The intercom chose that moment to buzz.

“That had better not be Jake,” said Peter.

I got up and went to answer it.

“Miss Rachel?” said the doorman. I’d long since given up on trying to convince him to drop the “miss.”

“Yes?”

“There’s a man here to see you? He said you’d recognize him from his black eye?”

“Speak of the other devil,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Send him up, please.”

T
here were only four apartments on my floor, but their front doors opened onto a space so small that it felt full when just one of my neighbors and I chanced to be in it at the same time. This didn’t stop all six of us from rushing out to meet the mysterious stranger. We watched with great anticipation as the old-fashioned dial above the elevator began to trace its slow path from the lobby up to fifteen.

The elevator dial stopped for a long moment at three. “One would think that a person could walk up two flights of stairs,” said Luisa.

“That was probably Mr. and Mrs. Ditweiler. He has a touch of rheumatism in his knee, and she just had her hip replaced a few months ago,” I explained. “She makes gingerbread men for the building Christmas party every year. They’re really good.”

The dial resumed its path, creeping along to five, six and seven. Then it stopped again at eight.

“The mysterious stranger is big on building suspense, isn’t he?” said Hilary.

“It’s part of the whole mysterious thing,” Emma told her.

“How much of their lives do you think New Yorkers waste waiting for elevators?” asked Peter.

“Less than Californians waste sitting in cars,” I said.

The dial started moving again, this time advancing steadily onward from eight to twelve and then directly to fourteen.

“The poor kids,” said Jane. “They have no reason to think that thirteen even exists.”

The doors finally slid open, and the mysterious stranger stepped out, black eye and all.

“Hi!” cried Hilary. “I’m Hilary. Who are you?”

He looked from one face to another. I guessed he wasn’t expecting to find such a crowd waiting for him. I cleared my throat and gave a little wave, and his gaze landed on me.

“Ms. Benjamin?”

“Why don’t we skip right to first names?” I suggested. After all, we’d been spending a lot of quality time together of late.

“I’m Special Agent Lattimer. Ben Lattimer.”

It was nice finally to have a real name for the guy—“Mysterious Dark-Haired Stranger in the Suede Jacket” had been more than a little cumbersome. But Ben didn’t look anything like a special agent. He wasn’t wearing a dark suit, white shirt, narrow tie, and sunglasses. Instead, he had on a pair of faded Levi’s, a striped button-down, and, of course, his suede jacket.

“When you say Special Agent, what exactly are you a special agent of? Could we see some identification?” Peter asked, placing his hand on my shoulder. Only if you knew him as well as I did would you have picked up on the note of tension in his voice. He’d been both embarrassed and annoyed that a complete stranger had been in on the Andrew Marcus tackle with me. He’d also been less than appreciative when I pointed out that his Iron City consumption the previous evening might have slowed his reflexes.

Ben reached into his jacket and withdrew one of those leather badge holders you see on TV. He flipped it open. “FBI Financial Fraud Unit.”

“Cool,” said Hilary.

We all took turns studying Ben’s ID before agreeing that it looked authentic and ushering him into the apartment. None of us was sure if it was appropriate to offer food to special agents, but it seemed rude to continue eating without making the offer, and he accepted with an enthusiasm that suggested he hadn’t been recently feasting on pierogies, coffee cake, or Quarter Pounders with Cheese.

“I first got interested when Perry did the Tiger buyout,” he told us between mouthfuls of curry. “Bill Marcus wrote us—the Unit, I mean—a bunch of letters outlining his theory.”

“You pay attention to that sort of thing?” I asked in surprise. I didn’t want to think about how much trouble I could have saved myself, not to mention everyone else in the room, if I’d simply reported my concerns to somebody like Ben in the first place.

“We get a lot of letters from crackpots,” Ben acknowledged. “But you never know when one of those crackpots is going to be blowing the whistle on the next Enron.”

“There seem to be a lot of crackpots in Texas,” said Hilary. Ben looked at her blankly. “You know. Enron. Texas. Crackpots.”

“Anyhow,” continued Ben,“the Marcus letters were actually pretty coherent, at least compared to some of what we see. And the basic chronology and the people involved were exactly as Marcus outlined. Which made me think that maybe he wasn’t your garden-variety crackpot. I started looking for a money trail, and it turned out that all three of the principals—Perry, Gallagher, and Brisbane—had some interesting offshore accounts.”

“Were the accounts in their own names?” said Luisa. “Because I couldn’t find a thing.”

“Far from it. I’d heard that Gallagher was an expert at making money, but he was also an expert at hiding it. They were buried deep, hidden inside a maze of shell companies and private partnerships. It was a real mess, but once I located the accounts, I could begin tracing the flows of cash in and out.”

“And then?” prompted Emma. “What happened then?”

Ben ran a hand through his dark hair. “And then a new case came in, a live one, and I had to put the Tiger investigation on hold. After all, it was only a speculative thing, a routine follow-up on a letter from the crackpot file.”

“But you kept with it anyway, right?” asked Jane, a firm believer in perseverance as a virtue.

“I’d hoped to keep with it in my spare time, but the new case didn’t leave me with any. When it eventually wrapped, I wanted to go back to investigating the Tiger deal, but I was told that another agent had taken up where I left off and concluded there wasn’t anything to it.”

“Seriously?” I said. “Wow, those guys were good. I mean, if trained professionals couldn’t find evidence of anything wrong—”

“Not so fast,” said Ben. “That’s not the whole story. I didn’t think much about it at the time, and before long I was neck-deep in another new case, and then another, and after a while I’d pretty much forgotten about the Tiger deal. Until last week, that is. Which is when I read an article about the Thunderbolt buyout—”

“—which got you wondering,” interrupted Hilary.

“Exactly. So I went to pull the Tiger file. Only—”

“—there was no Tiger file!”

“Hilary,” Luisa said. “Let the man finish his own sentences.”

“She’s right, though, isn’t she? The Tiger file was gone?” I asked.

“It was more than gone. There was no trace that it or even the letters from Bill Marcus had ever existed. Everything had been completely wiped from the system.”

“That sounds like the sort of thing that happens in South American dictatorships, where the government ‘disappears’ people,” said Hilary.

“Thank you for perpetuating tired stereotypes of my homeland,” said Luisa.

“Look,” said Ben,“I don’t know who erased the records, or where the order to do so came from, but remember a United States senator was involved. My initial investigation probably tripped an alarm or two somewhere important.”

“Whatever happened to checks and balances?” asked Jane.

Ben shrugged. “The very fact that the records were gone confirmed for me that I’d been on to something. And the good news is, based on what we saw at today’s shareholders’ meeting, a lot of people suspected what Perry had going with Gallagher and Brisbane. With all of the shareholders present and the media coverage, there’s no way there won’t be a thorough investigation now. Perry and Brisbane may have dodged some very real bullets, but I think their respective careers may be over.”

“But what about Jake Channing’s career? You must have suspected him, too,” Peter asked. “Or why else were you following him?”

“That’s why I’m here,” he said.

“Oh.” I said knowingly. Then I realized I had no idea what he meant. “What do you mean ‘that’s why you’re here’?”

“When I read about the Thunderbolt deal, and after finding the Tiger file gone, I decided it was worth looking into things on my own. I called Winslow, Brown on Monday morning pretending to be from Perry’s office to get the names of the bankers working on the deal with Gallagher. I thought his team would either be in on the entire thing or would make good witnesses. Once I had your names, I did some digging. It didn’t take long to find out that not only had Jake worked at Gallagher’s old firm, he used to date Gallagher’s wife, so I was suspicious of him from the beginning, and even more so once Gallagher was murdered.”

“If you were investigating us, didn’t you find out about Mark Anders actually being Andrew Marcus?” I asked. “Didn’t that raise any flags or trip any alarms or anything?”

He shook his head. “No. It was sloppy of me, especially in retrospect, but I figured that looking into the junior associate would be a waste of time; he was unlikely to know much of anything. Instead I focused on Jake and on you, Rachel. I had my concerns about Jake, but you checked out clean. I wanted to approach you, but I wasn’t sure how. I needed to get a better sense of whether I could trust you.”

“And that’s why you were eavesdropping when we were at the St. Regis on Tuesday night?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. Sorry about that, but I didn’t want to just march right up and introduce myself. Then Dahlia was attacked on Wednesday morning, and you disappeared, so I was left with Jake. I was trying to figure out my next move when I saw him meet up with Annabel Gallagher late on Wednesday.”

“And you were following him on Thursday, when I saw you at Starbucks,” I said.

“That’s right. It didn’t take long to put two and two together. I figured that they were behind both Gallagher’s murder and the attack on Dahlia Crenshaw. In fact, I almost stopped you that afternoon, to try to warn you, but I was worried that you’d alert Jake, since you and he seemed to be friends, and I didn’t want to lose track of him. That was an excellent disguise, by the way. I would never have recognized you if I hadn’t been able to hear you and Jake talking.”

“So you were following Jake. And you followed him to the boat basin on Thursday night.”

“Not that I did much good there. I wasn’t far behind him when I saw somebody else following him. Now I know it was Andrew Marcus, but at the time I thought it might have been another accomplice, so I had to give Jake more of a lead than I would have liked. And I didn’t realize he was counting on meeting you there. Then I heard shots, and I came running—”

“—and collided into me,” I concluded for him. “Sorry about that.”

He gave me a sheepish smile. “Occupational hazard.”

“Okay. So you were on to Jake and Annabel. But what do you want from us?” asked Peter.

“I’m on to Jake and Annabel—it sounds like we’re all on to Jake and Annabel—but we don’t have any proof.”

“Jake seems to think he can bluff his way though,” I told Ben, explaining about the e-mail Jake had sent me and his message from earlier that night. “And he thinks I’m clueless enough to buy his bluff.”

“The nerve of that guy,” Peter muttered.

“Good,” said Ben. “Then I think we have a chance.”