The Finishing School

42

A WHILE LATER Melanie was still absorbed in staring out the airplane window when someone once again sat down in the empty seat. When she turned and saw Dan-looking spectacular, smelling clean and yummy, staring back at her with clear blue eyes-she felt such a wrenching sense of loss that for a moment she couldn’t even speak.

Seeing her face, Dan held up his hand. “Don’t get upset.”

“I’m not upset,” she said quickly.

“You look upset.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“You shouldn’t be. I’m only bothering you because Bridget said you wanted to see the line sheet from that intercept last night. Otherwise I would never’ve come over here.”

“Can’t we put this fight behind us?”

“Sure, I get it. We’re grown-ups. We keep our distance, keep it professional. When the case is done, we go our separate ways.”

She hadn’t meant it like that, and she was disappointed he’d taken it that way. Maybe Dan wasn’t, as Melanie secretly hoped, waiting for an overture from her. Maybe he’d be better off with Bridget. The two of them had so much in common, after all, whereas Melanie and Dan might as well have grown up on different planets.

“Right. Professional,” Melanie said, then drew a deep breath. “So show me that line sheet.”

“Here.”

He handed her a copy of a handwritten page taken from the wiretap log. The federal wiretap statute required that a real live human being listen in on every tapped phone call as it was being recorded to make sure the bad guys were talking about crime; if they weren’t, the tape recorder had to be shut off. To prove they were monitoring properly, the agents took contemporaneous handwritten notes summarizing the conversations. The piece of paper she held in her hand contained the monitor’s notes of a phone call intercepted the previous night at 9:48 P.M., between subject Jay Esposito and subject Bud LNU, aka George Eliot.

“Where do you get this aka?” Melanie asked.

“It’s the subscriber name on the cell number Expo placed the call to.”

“It’s a fake.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Oh, come on, George Eliot? Wrote Middlemarch?”

“What, you spend all your time in the library in high school?” Dan grinned.

Man, he had a movie-star smile. Her chest hurt, thinking of him out last night with Bridget.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. I like libraries. The quiet. The smell of old books. Very Zen.”

“They give me the heebie-jeebies,” Dan said. “Anyway, no low-life drug dealer is gonna know about George Eliot. I mean, I don’t know about him.”

“Her. Eliot was a woman.”

“See? What’d I tell ya?”

She smiled. “Still, you make a good point. Maybe the name is real. Did you run it?”

“Yeah. We got nothin’. Too common. We managed to ID the black bodyguard, though.”

“How’d you do that?” she asked.

“Had a coupla uniforms traffic-stop him last night and ask for ID. One Lamar Gates. He’s got a pretty good rap sheet. Assaults, a few criminal sales, that sorta thing. Did a stretch in Rikers a few years back. This is who Expo has working security for him.” He shook his head in disgust.

“What about the Russian?”

“Pavel LNU. We got shit on him.”

“Hmm, okay. Let me read this.” Melanie scanned the line sheet. “Jesus, and Bridget told me they didn’t say anything about Carmen!”

“Are you kidding me? She’s got her head up her butt, that kid.”

“Yeah, it reads clear as a bell.”

“With how nervous they sound, they gotta be behind it, don’t you think?”

“Sounds like it,” Melanie agreed.

“But nothing concrete. No locations,” he pointed out.

“God, I’m getting nervous about Carmen, Dan. Especially now that they’re recruiting Trevor to mule the shipment. Granted, that could just be because they’re afraid we’re on the lookout for her. But part of me worries it’s because they don’t have her in pocket anymore.”

“Settle down, now, I got a theory about that. I think there might be two separate deals in the works, so maybe they still are planning to use her. Here, take a look at this, right here,” he said, leaning across her and pointing, giving her a thrill that she had to work hard to ignore. “Expo sends Pavel to do something at Bud’s request last night. It must be some kind of separate drug shipment.”

“It’s not,” she said, shaking her head as she read the portion he’d indicated.

“Why not? Bud asks about ‘that other thing we talked about before.’ Expo says he sent Pavel to take care of it, then he says, ‘It might not go because of the weather.’ What’s that, if not a drug deal?”

A crystal-clear vision of the Escalade barreling down on her flashed into Melanie’s head, making her shiver.

“It was me. Pavel tried to run me down with the Escalade when I left work last night.”

Dan stared at her in shocked silence. After a moment he said, very quietly, “You better be bullshittin’ me, or I’m gonna be incredibly pissed at you.”

“Why at me? I wasn’t the one behind the wheel!”

“You think this is a joke? You don’t call to tell me this happened, so I could watch out for you? What if they tried again?”

“They didn’t.”

“Not yet, maybe, but I guarantee you they will. Serves you goddamn right, missy, because now I’m gonna stick to you like glue, whether you hate me or not.”

“Okay, I guess I’ll just have to tolerate that,” she said, her lips curving involuntarily into a smile.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.”

“Whaddaya, busting my chops?”

“No. I appreciate your concern. Really.”

“Somebody better watch your back, with the crazy risks you take. So why the hell didn’t you call me last night when this happened?”

“Because I was in such a rush to follow up on that information you gave me about James Seward. And it was very interesting. Luis Reyes came clean right away. Seward leaned on him to hold back on us, not only about Charlotte Seward’s being home when the girls died but about the fact that Reyes actually reached Seward on his cell at least two hours before anybody called the police. You know what that means? We have Seward on obstruction!”

“Why the hell would Seward do that and leave those poor girls lying there? It almost makes you think he was involved somehow, that he needed the time to pretty up the crime scene. Which reminds me, I talked to Butch Brennan from the Crime Scene Team, jeez, it’s gotta be a couple days ago now. Things’ve been so crazy, I forgot to tell you.”

“You mean, about whether it was staged?”

“Yeah. He tells me there was something very odd. No latent prints of value anywhere in Whitney Seward’s bedroom or bathroom. Only smudges. Like the whole place’d been wiped clean.”

“Hmm.”

“You put that together with the open windows and the drugs planted near Whitney’s right hand when she was a lefty, and I’d say it’s pretty clear. Somebody else was there, knew there was monkey business, tried to delay discovery of the bodies, and tried to make the deaths look like voluntary ODs when they weren’t. What I don’t get is, why would Seward be the one doing that?”

“Covering up out of concern for his political career?” Melanie suggested.

“But he’d have to know there was something to cover up.”

“I agree, it’s very strange. Maybe there’s some other explanation. Luis Reyes thinks Seward only delayed because he got caught with his pants down in the middle of an assignation with Patricia Andover.”

“Isn’t she…?”

“The headmistress of Holbrooke, yes. Apparently Seward’s having an affair with her. Reyes has seen Patricia in the Sewards’ building at odd hours.”

“I don’t buy that. Why hang around the love nest a minute longer than you need to in the middle of a crisis like that? Only makes it more likely you’ll get found out.”

“I agree. Anyway, the bottom line is, we need to interview Charlotte Seward and confront her husband. I almost did it last night, but I figured they’d refuse to speak to me without a subpoena.”

“With everybody working on Expo as the top priority, I don’t see how we can talk to them right now. Don’t get me wrong, I hate to back-burner it as much as you do. Seward raises me up big time. He reminds me of that guy, you know, that rich guy in that movie with Jeremy Irons.”

“Reversal of Fortune? Where Claus von Bülow was tried for poisoning his wife?”

“Yeah, that’s it. That’s it exactly. Guy’s guilty as sin, and he walks. Liberal fucking defense attorneys for ya.”

“Great movie, though,” she said.

“You know why I like you? You always get what I’m talking about.”

She tried not to lose it, looking into his eyes. Work, work. Think about work. “Expo is definitely the top priority,” Melanie repeated. “Lulu Reyes told me last night that Carmen even mentioned him. Carmen knew about the drug running and may have spilled the beans to someone. And if that’s why Carmen is missing…”

“I know. You don’t have to spell it out. This guy takes care of witnesses.”

“Which makes me very worried,” Melanie said. “For Trevor.”