“We sat in the living room over there,” she said, looking through the walls of glass, “and I showed the videos to her. She was stunned and frightened. Ashamed. I kept playing them until she simply ducked her head and wouldn’t watch them anymore. It was cruel of me and, frankly, I surprised myself. By this time I didn’t think I had any emotional investment left in the man, but I found that I was getting some kind of unseemly satisfaction out of this perverse humiliation of her. But finally I stopped.
“I really didn’t blame her, after all. The woman’s intelligent, a superb executive secretary. She knew sleeping with the boss was going nowhere but, on the other hand, it wasn’t hurting her at all at bonus time, and he was continually giving her all these gifts. I know what executive secretaries do. I used to be one. I know what it’s like. A good one practically runs the company, but she never gets any credit for it and compared to some of the men executive officers-who do a hell of a lot less than she does-her salary’s paltry. She thinks, what the hell, she deserves the perks she gets from sleeping with the bastard. She knows all about the boss’s personal life-this woman knew Colin and I hadn’t had sex in two years. She knows all about the business. Where it’s strong, where it’s weak. Where all the corporate skeletons are buried. Who’s got clout, who hasn’t. But most important: she has access.”
Rayner stopped and looked at her hands. She was doing something with her fingers, more precisely her fingernails, looking at them as though she could see what she was doing, though Last doubted she could in the pale, watery light. Then she looked up and went on.
“She was sobbing, distraught. I could tell that in her mind she had lost everything. I started talking to her. I said, look, relax, relax. Truth is, the marriage was over, and you were just the next in line. That’s okay, really. I admitted that I was angry but not because I loved the man. I was just angry at being used by him. And I said that, frankly, she should be angry about being used too. I said I wasn’t going to do anything with the videos. I said I didn’t think either of us would get what we deserved out of a nasty divorce battle. I calmed her down, got her to thinking. And then I said that we’d both be better off putting our heads together and try to come up with a way to earn ourselves a little security out of all this. I told her that neither one of us had any protection, any security for the future. We could both end up on the sidewalk tomorrow with nothing. Nothing. And it could happen so easy.” She paused. “I presented her with a proposition.”
As Rayner talked, Last sat with his back against the wall and slowly felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. Surrounded by the aqueous light of Rayner’s peculiar world, he listened to a woman he had been cultivating for eight months, waiting for just the right opportunity to use her and their affair as a stepping-stone to his own fortune, only to have it slowly revealed to him that he had been thrusting in the moonlight with Morgan le Fay. As she talked his heart alternately hammered and started as he thought that at any moment she was going to blast him to hell for his many months of calculated intercourse. He felt as though this woman had been reading him like a newspaper, and she was about to deliver the coup de grace.
But it didn’t happen. Instead, he listened to the story of how two women, invisible in plain sight, had gathered enough information-about DataPrint… and related businesses called Concordia Investments and Hormann Plastics and Hermes Exports and Strasser Industries-to have the two of themselves killed on the spot. When she finally came to a stopping point, they sat in silence among the silk and glass and fragrance of heather and for the first time in his life Last didn’t know whether to scream in jubilation or horror. He had discovered either the mother lode of all his adventuring, or he had just listened to his own death warrant. He honestly could not place a bet on which it might be. The odds were skewed by the magnitude.
“Jesus… Mary… and Joseph,” he said.
She was looking at him as though she were awaiting his assessment She wanted to know what he thought.
“Rayner,” he swallowed, “listen to me.” His mouth was cottony. “This could get you killed… I mean, I cannot believe you’ve gone this far. Do you have any idea how… exposed, how vulnerable you are? Both of you.”
“Only in the last few months,” she said. “When we began to piece together the drugs part of it. That scared the shit out of us.”
Last looked at her. He thought he could sense the fear in her now, but at the same time he didn’t know why he hadn’t sensed it before. Who, exactly, had he been deceiving all these months? Her or himself?
“How long have you been doing this?” he asked.
“Nine months. We had to take it slow,” she said with unintended understatement. “We didn’t want to screw it up. You know, little by little, checking and double-checking, take a step and listen. Take another step and listen.”
He waited a moment, not wanting to seem too eager.
“You have documentation?”
“Of course. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
“But…” And then it dawned on him. “She-the secretary-continued her affair with Colin?”
Rayner nodded. “She had to. I don’t think this would have worked otherwise. Every time he took her, she took him.” She smiled. “Talk about poetic justice…”
“And she’s still sleeping with him?”
“I hope so.”
She was looking at him, her face only a few feet away from his, through the clear water. In the instant before she spoke he anticipated her.
“We’ve gone about as far as we can go,” she said, “without some help.” He could almost see her holding her breath, hoping she hadn’t made a mistake about him. “Do you want in on this?”
Chapter 53
Neuman could see the glow from the fire in the South Shore Harbor Marina even before he turned off NASA Road 1 into the Swan Lagoon development of Nassau Bay. Cars were slowing along the highway to puzzle over the orange light reflecting off the bottom of the Gulf clouds that were drifting inland, and when he turned into the neighborhood street that would take him to Sheck’s house, people were standing on their front lawns looking toward the fire.
Sheck’s house was a modern one-story bungalow on a winding street lined with palms and green lawns and in a price range not unlike Valerie Heath’s. Neuman parked in the front drive, hiding the car as best as he could behind a screen of oleanders, and got out, hardly noticed by the scattered clusters of people standing in their front lawns across the street looking in his direction. The back of Sheck’s house was right on the water and almost directly across the lagoon from the marina.
He didn’t go to the front door but casually walked around to the side of the house, found a wooden privacy fence with a gate and went into the back yard. From here the fire in the marina looked like a conflagration as it reflected from both the clouds and the surface of the bay water, the fire itself the brightest point between the two illuminations. The entire marina seemed to be burning.
Throwing a glance at the back of the house to make sure he didn’t miss the obvious-a light, someone standing at a window or door-he moved along the thick hedges that lined both sides of the back yard for privacy from the neighbors and stood near a pier at the edge of the water and looked across. He could hear sirens and bullhorns and the wailing of emergency vehicles, the cacophony hanging in the moist, still air as though the entire confusion were taking place in an amphitheater. As he stood there with his feet in the damp grass, it was hard for him to believe that Burtell was over there, burned up in a fire that no one understood yet. For a moment he wondered what it had been like for Burtell to be blasted into the next life.