It was a trade-off he was willing to accept: access for limited freedom. But he had to take advantage of that access for this to work. So first up: Find out what the hell the Feebs wanted with Abby's husband.
But there was more to Evan Harmon than whatever he'd been doing recently to attract attention. People did not operate in vacuums. They were shaped and formed by family and friends and events. Justin needed to know what had shaped Evan so he could understand the way the man thought. It wasn't just action that formed patterns, it was thought processes. Justin understood that he needed to know a lot more about the first victim.
Next on his agenda: Ronald LaSalle.
Ronald was linked to Evan. They communicated regularly and they did business together. Justin had to find out exactly what the business was. In Ellen Loache's folder were names of people and businesses that had to be checked out. Someone on that list would prove to be a critical connection between the two men and the three murders. He also had to find out if Ronald had been involved in Evan's illegal activity. And if so, how deeply. Was he a peripheral player who had stumbled onto something by mistake or could he have been involved at the very core?
Third on his list to explore: Rockworth and Williams. The firm was the single element in this entire mix that appeared repeatedly and had tentacles that reached out to all parties. Justin had learned an important lesson as a homicide investigator: People killed for love or money. It's what everything boiled down to. In this case, Rockworth and Williams seemed to be the source of-or at least the common link to-all the people who were involved. Evan Harmon had worked there. His father had worked there. Evan's company, Ascension, used Rockworth as its primary broker for its hedge fund investments. Forrest Bannister, Ascension's CFO and the man who found Evan's body, had connections to Rockworth. Ellis St. John was R amp;W's link to Ascension, and he had disappeared.
Justin had to get inside Rockworth and Williams. Had to talk to H. R. Harmon and Lincoln Berdon. Most of all, he knew he had to find Ellis St. John. Right now, St. John's disappearance made him the prime suspect in Evan Harmon's murder and possibly the other two as well. But Justin knew the fact that he was gone had other ramifications, too. St. John might have fled because he was afraid. Or he, too, might have suffered the same fate as his two fellow Wall Streeters. Justin understood that if he did find Ellis St. John, he might not find him alive. Right now, though, he had to work as if the R amp;W employee was on the lam. And involved in the murders.
Then there were the two official suspects. Justin knew he couldn't overlook them. He did not believe in Larry Silverbush's solution to the crime: that Abby and Dave Kelley had committed a crime of passion. Or even one of convenience. Right after Evan's body had been discovered, it had been a plausible theory. But now it was too myopic a view. The case had expanded, gotten more complicated. There were too many other angles that had overtaken the DA's quick fix. And too many other deaths. Right now, Justin had one big advantage over Silverbush and his investigative crew: It was unlikely that they had any suspicion that the two murders in Rhode Island were connected to Evan Harmon's slaying. That probability made all the difference in the world. Nonetheless, Justin knew that he couldn't dismiss Abby's and Kelley's involvement. Just because things had gotten more complicated didn't mean that they weren't involved at some level. He didn't believe that they were, but he couldn't ignore the possibility. He couldn't afford to ignore anything right now.
Justin also knew he had to talk to Bruno. He was still waiting for Billy DiPezio to send him the results of the fingerprint search he'd asked for-a search that would, Justin hoped, identify the man who'd tried to shoot Bruno. The big man was another piece to this strange puzzle, and Justin had to find out where that piece fit. Bruno had said he'd appear once Justin was back in East End Harbor, and Justin knew that Bruno was, in his own way, a man of his word. So he could wait for Bruno to keep his word. At least for a little while.
And finally, he had to find the meaning of Wanda's message to him.
Just for the hell of it, he had googled the words that Wanda had managed to scrawl on her body: "Hades" and "Ali."
Hades had 9,850,000 mentions on the main page. There were 176,000 different references to the use of the word "Hades" in song lyrics; there was a Hades computer software program; paintings of the god Hades in museums all over the world; poems and books about Hades dating back hundreds of years; food products named Hades and a Hades Bloody Mary mix. It was impossible even to begin to sift through the various choices. The only thing he knew about Hades was the mythological aspect: it was the name, in Greek mythology, for both the underworld and the god of the underworld. So what Justin did was to pick the very first and easiest Google reference and enter it into his computer. He didn't really know why he bothered, except he liked the sound of it, and including it in his file-seeing it whenever he went back in to refer to his notes-would work to keep his anger about Wanda fresh and present and alive. He decided to title the entire casebook document Hades, and he typed in the following from something called the "Hades homework page": "HADES: Zeus's brother and ruler of the underworld and the dead. Also called Pluto-God of Wealth."
Justin thought it was fitting. The god of wealth and the ruler of the dead. Sounded like a god whose path he might cross one of these days.
Googling the name "Ali" produced 216,000,000 mentions. He managed to scroll through about forty of them-one-line descriptions of sites for info on Muhammad Ali, Ali G, NASA's advanced land imager (acronym ALI), Ali Baba, and an actor named Ali Suliman who was in the film Paradise Now (which, oddly enough, Justin had gone to see with Abby Harmon at the old-fashioned, arty East End Harbor movie theater that always smelled of grape drink and disinfectant). Justin gave up fairly quickly on this second search, deciding it was a reasonably safe bet that neither Muhammad Ali nor Ali G had anything to do with his murder investigations. He found absolutely nothing there he deemed worth adding to his lists.
Restless, he reached for his cell phone and dialed Abby's number in the city. She had not returned his calls from yesterday. He got her answering machine again, left a briefer message than his last one. "It's Jay. I'm in East End and I'd like to talk to you." She knew his number, so he didn't bother leaving it. The fact that he even considered leaving it made him realize that the relationship had shifted and was already different. So after a very brief pause, all he said was, "So call me. Bye." He then called her cell, which also immediately went to voice mail. He repeated, almost word for word, what he'd left on her home machine. Then he hung up, dissatisfied.
He paced around the room, not exactly sure what was fueling his impatience. At 7:30 p.m. Justin forced himself to sit back down at the computer. He made a short To Do list: an abbreviated version of everything he'd already entered, now turning them into specific tasks, in order of priority. This final list read: 1. Evan Harmon-background; Fed investigation 2. Ronald LaSalle-business connections to Harmon