The Key

chapter fifteen

I t was dark by the time I climbed up to the pedestrian walkway over Hudson Street. I could smell the exhaust from the commuters’cars below, their engines idling as traffic moved slowly through the Holland Tunnel and into New Jersey.

Concrete stairs led down to the cobblestones of Laight Street and its string of converted warehouses and factories. I ventured along the sidewalk with careful steps, alert to any danger that might be lurking in the shadows.

But I reached the familiar door without encountering any lurking dangers. With a sigh of relief I pressed the button for the fifth floor.

“Yes?” The voice over the intercom was wary.

“It’s me.”

Caution gave way to impatience. “It’s about time.” The buzzer buzzed and I pushed the door open.

The hike up the four steep flights of stairs actually felt good after the several hours I’d spent on the bus. Its route had looped through midtown, over to the U.N. and then down to the South Street Seaport and the office towers of Wall Street before heading back up to Times Square and midtown. The narrative that came over the speakers had been interesting at the beginning, but it grew dull with repetition-even the same jokes were repeated. Fortunately, I felt I had enough of a plan to disembark in Tribeca before the bus headed uptown for the third time.

The first part of my plan involved finding a hideout that was warm, comfortable, and equipped with Diet Coke and other important staples. In addition to meeting these criteria, Emma’s loft would be a relatively safe retreat given its out-of-the-way location and that it lacked the potentially prying eyes of a doorman. It had the further advantage of being accessible, because if Emma turned out not to be home, I had a convenient copy of her key stashed on my key ring. And if she were home, I doubted that she would turn me in to the cops.

Instead, when I finally emerged from the stairwell, she was standing in the open doorway holding out a glass of white wine.

“We thought you’d never get here. Are you hungry? We were thinking of ordering Thai.”

My friends had been awaiting my arrival since midafternoon. They’d anticipated the thought process that would lead me to Emma’s loft-in fact, they’d arrived at my decision well before I had. They probably hadn’t wasted as much time trying not to hyperventilate and getting rid of spy phones.

“How’s our favorite fugitive from justice?” Jane said by way of greeting.

“Assuming there’s actually a warrant out for Rachel’s arrest, which is probably premature, let’s remember that technically neither Rachel nor anybody here knows she’s a fugitive from justice,” warned Luisa. “Otherwise, we’d be harboring a fugitive. And this isn’t my area of expertise, but I’m fairly confident that would be against the law.”

“So you’ve heard the whole story?” I asked.

“Matthew called me,” Emma explained. “Peter called him from a pay phone, apparently being very cloak-anddaggers about the whole thing. He was concerned enough about his call being traced, even from the pay phone, that he didn’t want it to go to any of our cell phones or homes. I guess he thought Matthew’s clinic was the best option-he even dialed the switchboard rather than Matthew’s direct extension as an extra precaution. If anyone were actually tracing the call, it would probably take awhile to figure out that Matthew was the person he called and that his girlfriend was your college roommate.”

At least I wasn’t the only one being paranoid about phones. I’d been scared to even use a pay phone. Not that there was one on the bus.

“And then Matthew called Emma, and Emma called us,” said Luisa. “We figured you’d come either to my apartment or here, but since my building has a doorman, we thought you’d choose here.” Luisa’s family practically owned a small South American country, and their New York apartment had more than a doorman-it had a staff that included a butler, a cook, and assorted other uniformed attendants. It was a great place to hang out if you wanted your every whim catered to, but it probably wasn’t the place to be if you wanted to minimize personal interactions.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” said Jane. “But we thought you’d be here sooner-we were starting to worry.”

“And for Peter to get so worked up, when he’s usually so calm-we knew that whatever was happening had to be serious,” added Emma.

“Little did we know that you’d cooked up such a clever disguise, Rach. It’s a good look on you. Is it Mary-Kate or Ashley that you’re going for?” asked Hilary.

In addition to the warmth, comfort and availability of certain caffeinated beverages, I’d chosen Emma’s apartment because I knew it was the most likely to yield another important part of my plan. If the police thought I’d killed Gallagher and attempted to kill Dahlia, they would be focusing all of their efforts on finding me and further building their case against me.

Which meant that nobody was trying to find out who the real murderer was. And not only was unmasking the killer a prerequisite for clearing my name and returning to business as usual, it seemed to be the only way to guarantee that he or she-and a lot of what I knew implied that it could very well be a she-wouldn’t strike again.

However, tracking down a killer wasn’t going to be easy when I was a fugitive. I needed help.

There was Peter, of course. But even if I hadn’t been so awful to him, and even if I had been able to deliver a decent apology, it wasn’t possible to turn to him in this situation, when the police were probably tracking his movements and communications in the hope that he’d lead them to me.

No, I knew who I needed, and that unusual twist of events that had brought all of my friends to the city this week now seemed especially fortuitous. And, fortuitously, they all seemed eager to come to my aid. In fact, they were surprised that I bothered to ask.

“Why do you think we’ve spent the entire afternoon cooped up here, waiting for you to show?” Hilary replied.

Emma called in an order to a restaurant around the corner. “I’ll pick it up instead of having them deliver,” she said. “That way we don’t have to worry about a deliveryman seeing you, and I can stop at a pay phone and call Matthew. Then he can call Peter and let him know you’re safe.” She giggled. “We’ll have to figure out a code. Like ‘the eagle has landed’ or ‘full moon over Tulsa’ or something like that. Rachel, is there any special message you want to get to him?”

I opened my mouth, but I wasn’t sure what to say. Asking Emma to tell Matthew to tell Peter I was sorry could hardly undo the damage I’d wrought. As apologies went, that would be setting a whole new standard for lame.

“Rachel?”

“We’re sort of in a fight,” I confessed sheepishly.

“Excuse me?” asked Jane.

“What could you possibly fight about with Mr. Too-Good-To-Be-True?” asked Hilary.

“You’re being ridiculous about something, aren’t you?” asked Luisa.

“Yes,” I admitted. “It’s pretty much all my fault.”

And everything that had happened that morning came spilling out.

“So,” summarized Hilary when I’d finished,“You’re never home, but you have plenty of time to flounce around with some guy from work. And meanwhile, Peter’s moved three thousand miles to do nothing but be supportive and sweet and cook for you and hack e-mail accounts for you and bring you Diet Coke in bed, and you pick a fight and accuse him of espionage?”

I would be the first to say my behavior had been deplorable, but it all sounded even worse when she put it like that.

“Why are you trying to drive him away?” asked Jane.

“Because you were right. I’m scared.”

“Of what?” asked Emma.

“I don’t know, exactly. I mean, there are all the usual clichéd answers: I’m scared of losing my independence, and I’m scared of things not working out. But none of that excuses taking it out on Peter. Is it even fair to ask him to forgive me? Wouldn’t he be better off getting rid of me and finding some nice emotionally stable person to marry?”

“You’re completely insane,” said Hilary.

“That’s exactly my point,” I said.

My friends were eager to settle in for a long session of psychoanalysis with me as their subject, but I insisted that we focus on more immediate problems instead. Emma left to pick up the food and call Matthew, but the rest of us gathered around the antique wooden farm table that loosely defined the dining area in the large open-plan space. Hilary refilled wineglasses while Jane pulled an easel over from the corner of the room that served as Emma’s studio. She tacked a large piece of drawing paper onto it, and then turned to us, marker in hand.

“Why don’t we make a list of all the possible suspects?” she suggested brightly. “Then we’ll divide them up and investigate.” Jane taught math at a private school in Cambridge, and I suddenly had a vivid sense of what it would be like to be in her class.

Hilary groaned. “Good Lord, Jane. We’re not your students, and this isn’t Scooby-Doo.”

“But if it were, I’m not Velma,” I said.

“I have the feeling it’s going to be a very long night,” said Luisa. She had crossed over to a window at the far end of the room, opened it wide, and lit a cigarette. I watched as she exhaled a stream of smoke out into the night.

“Come back, Luisa. How are you going to see the chart from way over there?”

“I’m trying to protect your unborn child from secondhand smoke,” she pointed out.

“Oh. Thanks, I guess.” Jane turned back to the easel. “Now, where were we? The suspects. Or should we start with the victims? What do you think, Rach?”

“Here’s the way I see it,” I said. “Gallagher was the primary target, but Dahlia knew something, or somebody thought she knew something, and that’s what got her into trouble.”

“Knew what?” asked Jane, scribbling on the easel.

“I don’t know. But that brings us back to why anybody would want to kill Gallagher in the first place. His current and former wives have the most obvious motives. They both were in his office the day before he died, so they had the opportunity. And now Naomi’s daughter probably gets an inheritance, and Annabel probably does, too, rather than getting divorced. Although, I’m not sure how much she’ll actually get.” I shared with them the tutorial Jake had given me on prenuptial agreements.

“Women are more likely than men to use poison to murder people,” commented Hilary. “I read that somewhere. There’s something very personal-almost domestic-about poison. It implies being close enough and trusted enough to access food or drink, or knowing somebody’s habits well enough to poison him.”

“But what about the work aspect of things?” asked Luisa. She crushed out her cigarette on the edge of the saucer she was using as a makeshift ashtray and rejoined us at the table. “You said yesterday that there was something off about this deal, Rachel. Could that be part of it?”

“I guess it’s not out of the question, and I still think that there’s something wrong with the Thunderbolt buyout,” I said. I had already filled them in on the anonymous e-mail I’d received. “But, if somebody was trying to block the deal, and if the deal was dirty and Gallagher was involved, all he’d have to do is report him to the SEC. Poisoning him-well, it’s like Hilary said. There’s something sort of personal about it. Besides, it was a woman who pushed Dahlia, and as far as I can tell, I’m the only woman associated with this deal in any way.”

“Then what would Dahlia know?” Luisa asked me. “If it was personal, rather than professional?”

“She’s worked for him for a long time, so she knows both of the wives, and she probably ends up fielding a lot of his personal calls and correspondence, even though she shouldn’t have to. Maybe she saw some papers that showed he was planning on divorcing Annabel, something like that?”

“But she said on her message that she wanted to talk to you about something she saw on the news,” Jane reminded me.

“Maybe that was unrelated. Maybe she wanted to tell me about something else altogether?” I ventured.

“Could be,” Hilary agreed. “But here’s what I don’t get. If it was one of the wives, how did she know to dress up like you when she went after Dahlia?”

The door opened just then and I gave an involuntary shriek. Being on the lam was still new to me, and I was a bit jumpy.

But it was only Emma, laden down with bags of food and, she said with a grimace, some “not-so-great news.”

It had taken her awhile to locate a working pay phone “-I guess they just assume everyone has a cell phone now-” but she finally found one and got through to Matthew. He had another update from Peter: the police had returned to the apartment in the afternoon with a search warrant. It didn’t occur to me at the time to wonder why Peter seemed to be spending all day in the apartment.

“A search warrant?” echoed Luisa. “That’s really not good. That means they’re serious.”

“Rachel’s innocent,” Jane pointed out. “So there’s nothing for them to find.”

“Well, sort of,” said Emma. “But I guess there was some stuff which, taken out of context, could be construed as evidence.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“They took your computer, for starters.”

“That won’t be a problem. Peter seemed pretty confident he’d cleaned up the hard drive.”

“It wasn’t just your computer. They also went through your study and found something interesting enough to box up everything in there and take it all away. Do you know what they could have found?”

I didn’t have to think very hard to answer this. Mostly the files in my study held financial statements and medical records-it was all fairly innocuous, unless you counted the number of cavities I’d had filled. But in my rush to leave this morning, I’d also left my briefcase, complete with my “insurance policy,” the notebook I stored in its inside pocket, on top of the file cabinet. The most recent entries were pretty explicit regarding Gallagher’s treatment of me and my reactions.

“That’s not all,” Emma continued. “They took your TiVo, too.”

“My TiVo? There’s nothing on it but Peter’s Star Trek episodes and reruns of Dawson’s Creek. And my entire Forensic City backlog-oh.”

“Oh, what?”

“Forensic City. I didn’t see it, but Jake told me there’s an episode where somebody dies from a poisoned toothpick, sort of like how Gallagher died from the poisoned pencil.”

“I saw that episode,” said Hilary. “It was really good. I didn’t figure out what happened until the very end.”

“Was there anything else?” I asked Emma.

“Um, yes. One more thing,” she said reluctantly.

“What?”

“Under the sink. In the kitchen.”

God only knew what was in that cabinet-I’d been surprised simply to find usable dishwasher detergent the other night. It was probably all the same stuff that was there when I moved in. I’d always meant to sort it out, but I never really used the kitchen, so what was the point? I was fairly confident that my housekeeper kept it reasonably neat, but that was about the extent of it. “The woman I bought the apartment from was in her nineties. I have no idea what she might have accumulated,” I said.

“Yes, well, she seems to have accumulated a nice big box of rat poison. With an active ingredient of potassium cyanide.”