The Hypnotist

EIGHT

Before he left for his morning run, Vartan Reza stopped in his daughter’s room and kissed the still-sleeping six-year-old on the forehead. She was a miniature of his wife. Both had strawberry-blond hair, high foreheads and finely arched brows. It was lucky that Gala was such a perfect reproduction of her mother. Better to have inherited her delicate looks instead of his swarthy skin and heavy features. Since 2001, the geopolitical situation had worsened, and he didn’t want his little one to suffer for her heritage.

Out in the hall, he rang for the elevator and stretched while he waited for it to arrive. When the doors opened Reza stepped into the perfectly polished wood-paneled cage and said good morning to the elevator man. Living in a luxury Park Avenue building was proof of Reza’s achievement, the visible reward of relentless effort. Early in his career he’d started taking on the tough cases that no one else had wanted, knowing they’d deliver the highest visibility if he won them. To date, he’d lost only two, but he feared he might be facing his third loss with Hypnos. The sculpture wasn’t going home unless he could figure out a new approach. Discovering that the bill of sale was forged had made him suspect every other piece of evidence the Iranian government had given him, and despite Hicham Nassir’s insistence that they were all legitimate, Reza was in the process of testing every document now.

Reaching the lobby, Reza thanked the operator and strode off across the black marble tiled floor. No, he wasn’t going to spoil his morning run by thinking about this now-he had Central Park to look forward to.

Reza stepped out onto the still, dark street into a steady rain. Not even a downpour would make him skip his run. He was too addicted to the high. Leaning on the streetlamp, he finished his stretches and then set off, jogging west across Park Avenue, to Madison, then to Fifth Avenue; then he turned north and ran the five blocks to the park’s Ninetieth Street entrance.

The path was empty, as it often was this time of day. That was one of the reasons Reza ran before six-he liked the solitude. No one needed him here; no one interrupted him. Nothing bothered him.

Before he knew it he’d passed the 102 Street Transverse on his left, and the Lasker Pool and Rink on his right. The rain wasn’t affecting his pace at all. Two miles farther in, he reached the north end of the park and took West Drive. After about 3.75 miles he came to the Seventy-Second Street Transverse and, running in place, peered through the downpour to see if the road was clear.

Going over seventy miles an hour, the vehicle hit the lawyer and flipped his body eight feet up into the air. His eyes were open when the paramedics found him; one of them thought the dead man looked as if he were staring up into the overcast sky, trying to ask a last question.

A husband and wife who’d also been out jogging had witnessed the accident, but the rain was too heavy and they were too far away to identify the make of the car or even be sure what color it was. Dark was all they could offer. Black? Navy? Deep green? They just didn’t know for sure. Neither of them remembered any numbers or letters from the license plate.

The driver slowed down as soon as he exited the park on Eighty-Fourth and Fifth and drove carefully east to Lexington and south to Seventy-Eighth Street, where he parked in front of a fire hydrant, left the keys in the ignition and walked into the Starbucks on the corner, where he ordered an espresso.

Sitting uncomfortably at one of the small wooden tables, sipping the bitter coffee, Farid Taghinia watched as a slight, dark-haired man carrying a briefcase got into the charcoal-gray Mercedes, turned the key in the ignition and drove off.

Only then did Taghinia allow himself to relax, proud of how well the operation had gone. The driver would leave the car, per his instructions, in a garage near Lake Placid, where it would be cleaned and painted and the plates would be changed.

Taghinia was absolutely sure no one would ever discover that it had been used as a murder weapon-so sure that he hadn’t noticed that even though it was late May and seventy-two degrees out, Ali Samimi had been wearing leather gloves when he got into the car.