If only Ruth didn’t get suspicious. He’d told her he wanted to walk, clear his head, think about what he was going to tell Rafe and Rob. When she’d offered to come with him, he’d told her he wanted to be alone, and she’d given him one long look and nodded, joining in a discussion with Julia and Cheney about August Ransom’s journals. Had they been destroyed in the fire at Julia’s house? Maybe he’d find the damned journals in Pallack’s apartment. But what he wanted most to find was Christie’s bracelet. Then he’d know. Of course Pallack could have gotten rid of it. Dix couldn’t bear to think what he would do if he couldn’t find something solid to nail the bastard.
Dix moved around to the back of the building. He had taken care to wear dark clothes, black boots, and a dark watch cap, had even blackened his face to blend into the shadows. His arm didn’t hurt much. He moved it, clenched his fist. He would manage.
He found the alarm system quickly, recognized it as top of the line, just as he’d expected, and disabled it.
He had little trouble with the lock on the back service door of the building. He slid silently out of the storage and receiving room into the small elegant foyer, with mailboxes and palm trees. He took the stairs, not the elevator, to the top floor. Six seconds only on that lock, and he gently eased open the Pallack front door. He stepped into the foyer, and the enormity of what he was doing hit him again. No, no more doubts, no more questions. It was time to act. He’d broken and now he’d entered. Dix immediately went to the windows and pulled down the shades, closed the curtains. Only then did he switch on his flashlight.
The penthouse occupied the entire sixth floor, and covered at least four thousand square feet, on two levels. Dix started on the second level. He found the master bedroom and immediately went to Charlotte Pallack’s jewelry box, an antique French affair large enough to hold Liechtenstein’s crown jewels. He carefully searched through the various pouches and boxes. Lots of expensive stuff, but not what he was looking for.
Either Charlotte was wearing the bracelet tonight, or, since Dix had nailed her with it, maybe Thomas Pallack hadn’t let her out of the house again with the bracelet on her wrist. Maybe Pallack had destroyed it. Or maybe it was in a safe.
Dix methodically searched the large bedroom with its extravagant furnishings, the space completely dark except for his flashlight, the incredible views hidden behind the heavy closed drapes. He didn’t find a safe even after lifting each of the six modern paintings off the walls, carefully searching the large walk-in closet, even tapping the walls behind Pallack’s shirts. He opened the drapes before he left the bedroom and looked back. It looked the same as it had before he’d come in.
He didn’t bother searching the remaining rooms on the second level, but went immediately downstairs to Pallack’s office. It probably looked somber and dark even in daylight with its burgundy leather furniture and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining three walls. It was his last hope, his best hope, really. Dix moved behind the big mahogany desk that smelled faintly of expensive cigars, and tried the top drawer. It was locked. It took him only a few seconds to pick it.
Dix was pleased to see it was a master lock and all the other desk drawers opened with it. He searched all the drawers thoroughly. He was hoping to find bank statements, a checkbook, records of any kind that might link Pallack to Makepeace, or to David Caldicott, or Christie, but there were only invoices in ordered piles, newspaper clippings on Pallack and his fundraising, some correspondence with various bigwigs, and the usual odds and ends in desk drawers. He said a silent prayer and powered up Pallack’s computer.
It was passworded, something he’d expected, and so he’d made up a list of likely words and numbers. He typed each one in, tried variations and additions, but none of them worked. He simply wasn’t good enough to hack in. He could have used Savich for that.
He found the safe behind an original Picasso line drawing featuring weird forms that resembled no human he’d ever seen. It was a tumbler safe and there was no way he could get into it without the combination, or a blowtorch. He went back to Pallack’s desk, got down on his knees, and pulled out each drawer, looking at the undersides. There was no combination underneath any of them. Then he lifted the keyboard and there, taped under the g and h, was a set of three double numbers. For the first time since he’d left the Sherlock house, Dix smiled.
A moment later, he pulled the safe handle open. It was about half full—mostly papers, separated with rubber bands, a big accordion-pleated folder, a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills, probably totaling five thousand, and underneath them, several velvet pouches. His heartbeat picked up as he pulled open the drawstrings of a dark burgundy velvet pouch and upended it. A magnificent diamond necklace and earrings filled his palm. He opened a dark blue velvet pouch—more diamonds, an emerald the size of his thumbnail, and a half dozen loose blood-red rubies, maybe ten carats each. Nothing else. No bracelet. He put the jewels back in their pouches and carefully replaced them by the pile of hundred-dollar bills. He pulled out a stack of papers, remembering how they were arranged, and methodically went through them. Pallack’s will, Charlotte’s will, half a dozen sets of partnership agreements, deeds to homes spread throughout the world, documents in French and Greek, insurance policies, business contracts he didn’t have time to read thoroughly but that had no immediate import to him.
He lifted out the single fat accordion folder, pulled away the rubber band. Inside were notebooks, maybe a dozen of them.
What was this?
There was a photo on top of them. Dix lifted out a five-by-seven color photo of David Caldicott standing next to—he became very still. Was it Christie? Charlotte? He couldn’t begin to explain it, but he knew to his soul he was looking at Christie, not Charlotte Pallack. David Caldicott had said he’d known Christie, said she’d admired his playing, that she’d come up and spoken to him. But they’d obviously known each other better than that. He could make out the familiar architecture of the Stanislaus buildings in the background. It was fall, with red, gold, and brown leaves mixed thick on the ground, tree branches nearly naked. Both David and Christie were smiling into the camera. Who’d taken the photo? He turned the photo over. There was a date scrawled but nothing else. Three years and four months ago.
He slipped it into his jacket pocket. He looked at the stack of thin notebooks and realized he had indeed found August Ransom’s journals. But how did they get here? Three folded sheets of stationery stuck out from under the cover of the very first notebook. He opened the first one, and stared down at a note pasted together out of words cut from a newspaper. He read:
Mr. Pallack, I have August’s journals. He told me all about you, and now I have proof. I want five hundred thousand dollars. Tomorrow noon leave the money in a carry-on bag on the foot of the statue in Washington Square.
Dix quickly read the other two notes, none dated so he didn’t know how far apart they’d been sent. The demands totaled two million dollars. He stared thoughtfully at the second note, read the final line several times:
We’ve had such a lovely thing going here, haven’t we? But August never believed I was greedy even when others said I was. You won’t hear from me again.
But of course Pallack had heard from the blackmailer again. The third note was short, simply instructed Pallack to leave a million dollars in a briefcase by the first jewelry counter just inside the entrance of Neiman Marcus, again at noon. It wasn’t signed, but the blackmailer had written Hasta Luega, whatever that was supposed to mean. More blackmail notes to come? Or had it indeed been the last demand?