First Class Killing

Chapter 13

BY THE TIMEICROSSED THE THRESHOLD AND slouched into my apartment in Boston that evening, I had been in constant motion for nearly twelve hours straight, much of that on an airplane doing six hundred knots from one end of the country to the other.

I dropped my bags in the middle of my living room, collapsed onto the couch, and let my head loll back onto the soft cushions. My apartment building was alive and noisy at that time of the evening. The heavy door downstairs swung open and slammed shut with dependable frequency as my neighbors came home from work. Next door, the baby cried, and I could smell the onions cooking in someone’s dinner. I sat with my eyes closed, luxuriated in the deeply tranquil state of being still.

I had managed to get through the flight by maintaining a single-minded focus on not dropping, burning, melting, or breaking anything. But the brain at rest is fertile ground, and as I sat there, memories from the day and night before began to bubble up and come back in a flood of odd details. A palm beside the pool with one brown frond. A white napkin with a dark wet ring soaked into it from where the glass had been. My glass? The taste of tequila still on my tongue like a thick paste. Margaritas first, then shots while I was dancing. I couldn’t remember going to bed.

But I remembered Angel.

I remembered the way she had looked at me and touched me and made clear that she took what she wanted.Do you want to be close to me? Those words whispered in my ear felt as if they were still there and would always be there, tattooed across my consciousness.

Then there was Jamie. The look on his face when he had seen my uniform, or at least recognized it for what it meant. Watching him as he walked away from me and never looked back. Most of all, the dull ache in my heart that I managed, like the pain in my chronically sore hamstring, simply to ignore. Or live with. Tristan was right. I needed my brother in my life. I needed to call him.

But first I needed to talk to Harvey, and before I talked to Harvey, I wanted to check out my prize. I booted up the computer and shuffled straight over to the A drive, where the disk containing the purloined data was still seated. When I pulled up the directory, it appeared that I had two files on the disk. I clicked on the one with last night’s guest list.

When it popped up, I smiled. All the names were there. They weren’t encoded or garbled or self-erasing, which I decided to count as a big plus. Included on the invitation list were not only names and addresses, almost all from the West Coast, but in many cases e-mail addresses as well. Mr. Bouncer did not seem to have been as meticulous in getting the women’s information as the men’s. The gender was predominantly male, and places of business were frequently included. The list included two hundred names, which didn’t seem like so much in the harsh light of day. I tried the next file.

I didn’t know if I had copied it from the laptop or if it had already been on the disk, but it was large and helpfully labeled “Master List.” The data in the master list were set up like the invitation list, with all the same information, but there were a couple of additional dimensions to the way these data were organized. I read the column headings, and as I began to appreciate what I had stumbled upon and what I could do with it, my brain function stirred awake.

I scrolled down, getting more excited with each page. By the time I reached the end, I was downright gleeful, primarily because it took so long to get there. There were more than thirteen hundred names in this file.

I picked up the phone and dialed Harvey.

“It’s me,” I said when he picked up. “I’m back, and I know how we’re going to get her.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve been going about this all wrong, Harvey. I know how we’re going to get Angel.”

“How?”

“Angel has a big problem, and I’m going to be her solution.”