The note was signed, August Spies.
Part Two
Chapter 26
My first call was to Claire.
We had about an hour. That was all we had before this grotesque, seemingly random murder became headlines around the world as the second killing in a vicious terror spree. I needed to know how Bengosian had died, and fast.
The second call was to Tracchio. It was still before five
A.M. The night duty officer patched me through. “It’s Lindsay Boxer,” I said. “You said to make sure you knew the minute something went on.” “Yeah,” I heard him grunt, fumbling around with the phone. “I’m at the Clift Hotel. I think we just found the motive for the Lightower bombing.”
I could visualize him bolting upright in his pajamas, knocking his glasses onto the floor. “One of those X/L partners finally come clean? It was money, wasn’t it?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “war.”
After I hung up with the Chief, I looked around Bengo-sian’s hotel room. No blood, no sign of a struggle. A half-filled champagne glass rested on the conference table. Another shattered, at Bengosian’s feet. His suit jacket was thrown onto the couch. An open bottle of Roederer.
“Get a description of who he came up with,” I told Lorraine Stafford, one of my Homicide inspectors. “They might have security cameras in the lobby if we’re lucky. And let’s try and track down how Bengosian spent the early part of his night.”
We have declared war, the note read, on the agents of greed and corruption…
A chill went right through me. It was going to happen again.
I knew that in the next few hours I had to find out everything I could about Bengosian and Hopewell Health Care. I had no idea what he had done to be murdered like this.
I picked up the crumpled note.
We will find you, no matter how large your house or powerful your lawyers. We are inside your homes, your workplaces… Your war is not beyond, but here. It is with us.
Who the hell are you, August Spies?
Chapter 27
By the time most people were turning on the morning news, we had descriptions of a “cute brunette in a suit” (the night doorman) who “looked like she was totally into him” (their waiter at Masa’s) and had accompanied Bengosian back to his room last night.
She was either the killer or an accomplice who had let the killer in. A different girl from the one we were seeking as the au pair.
I looked up from the papers on my desk and saw Claire. “Got a second, Lindsay?”
Claire always maintained an upbeat side, even in the grimmest of cases, but it was clear from her expression that she didn’t like what she had found. “I owe you a couple of hours sleep,” I said.
Her worried eyes said, No, you don’t.
“I’ve been doing this work ten years.” Claire sank into the chair across my desk and shook her head. “I’ve never seen the inside of a body that looked like that.”
“I’m listening,” I said, leaning forward.
“I don’t even know what to call it,” she said. “It was like jelly in there. Total vascular and pulmonary collapse. Hemorrhaging all through the gastrointestinal tract. Massive splenetic and renal necrosis … Degradation, Lindsay,” she said, seeing my eyes glaze.
I shrugged. “We talking some kind of poison, Claire?”
“Yeah, but with a toxicity that’s way beyond anything I’ve seen before. I skimmed through a few journals. I once worked on this child who had a similar vascular collapse and edema; we tied it to a rare adverse reaction to, of all things, castor oil. So I’m thinking castor beans. Not the case. It’s ricin, Lindsay! Relatively easy to make in large quantities. Protein derived from the castor plant.”
“Obviously, it’s poisonous, right?”
“Highly toxic. A couple of thousand times more powerful than cyanide,” Claire said, nodding. “Easily secreted. A pinprick would stop your heart. It can also be released into the air, Lindsay. But I was thinking ricin alone wouldn’t leave someone looking like that, unless it was delivered …”
“Unless it was delivered how?”
“Unless it was delivered in such massive amounts that it accelerated the destructive cycle by a factor of ten … fifty, Lindsay. This Bengosian, he was dead before the champagne glass fell. Ricin kills over a period of hours, even a day. You get severe, flu like warnings, gastrointestinal pains; your lungs fill up with fluid. This guy came back at eleven-thirty and they were calling it in by three o’clock. Three o’clock.”
“We found a champagne glass shattered on the floor. We sent it to the lab. They can test for this stuff, right?”
“Testing for the stuff isn’t what concerns me, Lindsay. Why kill him like this, when a tenth of this dosage would’ve done the trick?”
I saw where Claire was going. Whoever killed them had studied both victims. Both murders had been planned, set up. And the killer possessed weapons of widespread terror.
We are inside your homes, your workplaces… They were telling us, We have this stuff. We can deliver ricin in massive quantities if we want to. “Jesus, they’re warning us, Claire. They’re declaring war.”
Chapter 28
We called in everyone now. The Metropolitan Medical Task Force. The Bureau of Public Safety. The local office of the FBI. We weren’t talking murder any longer. This was terrorism.
The trail for the missing au pair had gone cold. Jacobi and Cappy had come back empty after passing her photo around the campus bars across the bay. One thing did pan out, though: the article Cindy put in the Chronicle on X/L. With news crews plastered all over their offices and the threat of a subpoena, I got a message from Chuck Zinn that he wanted to deal. An hour later, he was in my office.
“You can have your access, Lieutenant. In fact, I’ll save you the trouble. Mort did receive a series of e-mails in the past few weeks. The entire board did. None of us took them very seriously, but we put our internal security team on it.”
Zinn unbuckled his fancy leather case and placed an orange file on the table and pushed it across. “This is all of them, Lieutenant. By date received.”
I opened the file and a shock resonated through my system.
To the Board of Directors, X/L Systems:
On February 15, Morton Lightower, your CEO, sold 762,000 shares of his company stock totaling $3,175,000.
On that same day, some 256,000 of your own shareholders lost money, making their net return –87% in the past year.
35,341 children of the world died from starvation.
11,174 people in this country died from disease that were deemed “preventable” with proper medical care.
That same Wednesday, 4233768 mothers brought babies into conditions of poverty and hopelessness across the world. In the past 24 months, you have sold off almost $600,000,000 of your own company stock and purchased homes in Aspen and France, returning nothing to the world. We are demanding contributions to hunger and world health organizations equal to any further sell-offs. We are demanding that the board of X/L, and the boards of all companies, see beyond the narrow scope of its expansionist strategies to the world beyond, which is being crushed by economic apartheid.
This is not a plea. This is a demand.
Enjoy your wealth, Mr. Lightower. Your little Caitlin is counting on you.
The message was signed, August Spies.
I skimmed through the rest of the e-mails. Each was more belligerent. The menu of the world’s ills more grievous.
You’re ignoring us, Mr. Lightower. The board has not complied. We intend to act. Your little Caitlin is counting on you.
“How could you not turn these over to us?” I stared at Zinn. “This whole thing might have been prevented.”