She stood up and reached next to the counter to turn off the overhead light. The list she’d made on the packing paper stared up at her mockingly. A challenge unmet. The names circled around Emma’s. Faith stared at them again. They almost seemed to move. Birds of prey. She picked up the pencil and drew a dark line across Nathan Fox’s name and then across Lorraine Fuchs’s. The two deaths. The two murders. They were out of the running.
For murder, there has to be a motive—or at least a reason. Nathan could have been killed by a junkie.
That would provide a reason. But Lorraine? Faith found herself sitting down again and gazing intently at the sheet. There had been a peephole in the door of Nathan Fox’s apartment. He would never have let a stranger in—and he had opened the door to his murderer. It effectively ruled out the robbery theory. Had there been time for a greeting? For the recognition of what he’d admitted into his home? Death. Or did it happen fast, right away? The door opened, the shot—he never knew what hit him?
But the motive.
She looked at the other names. Who benefited?
What was the legal term? Cui bono. What did Nathan have? He had his manuscript. What did Lorraine have? The same thing. Arthur Quinn wanted it. But it would probably have made its way to him anyway—he’d have no need to kill for it. Who else? Poppy wouldn’t have wanted it published. “You know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my daughter— nothing.” Nothing she wouldn’t do to get her hands on something she thought would destroy Emma’s happiness, threaten her own? Poppy Morris a murderer? Extremely unlikely. Killer instincts didn’t necessarily translate into the real thing. And what about Todd Hartley and his respectably bourgeois new life? How far would he go to protect it? And Harvey? Harvey was available to the highest bidder.
People kill for money. Neither Fox nor Lorraine had had any. They also kill for revenge. That might apply to Fox in some way, but Lorraine? Yet, people also kill to protect themselves, Faith thought with a start. To keep from being found out. Had Lorraine known who’d killed Fox?
Means, motive, and opportunity.
She stared at the names, crossed some out and willed the rest to sort themselves out, willed them to speak—send a Ouija board message, send one name flying away from all the others.
And they did.
“Opportunity,” she whispered aloud. “Opportunity.”
Traffic was heavy, and by the time she got across town, it was getting late. Her father had very noncosmopoli-tan notions of dining hours. Besides, he had to get to church. She was tempted to keep the cab, but the doorman had his arm out for one, so Faith let it go. It was Christmas Eve, after all.
“Merry Christmas, Bobby,” she said to him. “It’s okay. I have the key.”
“Merry Christmas, miss,” he called back, helping the woman loaded down with parcels into the cab.
Ever since she’d left work, Faith had been repeating the same thing over and over to herself: How could I have missed it? She’d been missing a lot lately. She wasn’t worried, though. She knew exactly what she was going to do. The elevator was in use, so she took the stairs, running up, filled with the kind of energy she hadn’t known for weeks. It was almost over now.
Really over this time.
She let herself in. The apartment was dark and empty. No welcoming fire. No hum of conversation.
She walked down the hall to the kitchen. There was light streaming from beneath the door. She pushed it open and stopped.
Michael Stanstead, assemblyman from New York City, clad in a long rubberized raincoat like cops wear over their clothes, was pressing his wife’s hand on the grip of a gun. The muzzle was in her mouth and she was tied to a kitchen chair with wide strips torn from a bedsheet.
“Sorry, didn’t know you were into bondage. I’ll just be going now,” Faith said, trying to bluff as she backed out the swinging door. Tears were running down Emma’s cheeks, but she wasn’t saying a word. Faith wouldn’t have, either. Not with a Smith & Wesson stuck between her teeth.
Michael whirled around. The gun was now aimed at Faith.
“Get in here. And don’t move.”
She took a step forward and let the door swing shut behind her. “How did you get in the apartment? Nobody called up!”
Faith sincerely hoped he had distributed his Christmas largesse to the staff already.
“They know me. I have a key. From when I catered your party,” Faith stammered.
“Shit!” he screamed over his shoulder at his wife.
“You give the fucking key to everyone!” A slight look of guilt crossed Emma’s face. One more thing she’d done wrong. She probably should have kept better track of the keys.
“What are you going to do now, Michael? You can’t very well stage two suicides,” she whispered.
Three, thought Faith. Three, counting Lorraine. All the names she’d written on the sheet were falling into place now. Falling, leaving only one suspended in the air: Michael Stanstead.
She glanced at the kitchen table. A table like the one where only a little over two weeks ago she’d seen the headlines about Fox’s murder. Now she saw a piece of Emma’s engraved stationery. She didn’t have to read it to know what it said. It was one of those very polite notes saying it was really too much, that this was the end—one of those sincere missives that might have been dictated by the blackmailer himself, the blackmailer—her own husband.
I figured it out, Faith thought in despair, but not soon enough. She’d planned to come in, call until she found out where the Stansteads were, then alert the police.
They’d think she was crazy at first, but she knew she could prove it. The money had to be somewhere. And so would the wig he must have worn Friday night while driving the car in his first attempt—quick and easy—to kill his wife.
His wife! Why hadn’t Faith gotten on to him right away? It’s always the husband!
Emma’s question seemed to be taking a moment to register with Stanstead. He was standing with the gun trained on Faith’s forehead. A strand of hair worked its way down across one eyebrow, but she dared not push it back in place.
Then he exploded. Not moving the gun, he began to swear at Emma.
“You fucking bitch! You haven’t been able to do one single thing right since the day I married you!” Michael Stanstead was definitely insane—and he was on a roll.
“All you had to do was look pretty, smile, and say the right things—not the crazy shit that was always coming out of your mouth. And Jesus! You knew I was in the toilet after Black Monday, and you still wouldn’t give me any money for the campaign! I’m running for office, in case you haven’t noticed! What did you expect me to do!”
Kill me, my father, and two other women totally unrelated to either of us? seemed a wildly inappropriate answer, but apparently not to Michael, thought Faith.
She was watching him intently, willing him to at least pace up and down, so she might have a faint chance of getting the gun away from him. But he kept it trained on her without budging. The man must work out—not a bicep was quivering, although it would have been hard to tell through the coat. No bloodstains on his Armani—that would be for sure. Drop the coat in the river and no one would ever be the wiser.
“Wouldn’t touch your capital! Wanted to keep it for our children! What children! You couldn’t get pregnant if I drilled you from now until next Christmas.” Both Faith and Emma winced.