“I was thinking on the car ride here. The fact that he died of AIDS may shed some light on Sally’s state of mind.”
“I was thinking about that, too.”
“Did Jean Luc give her AIDS?”
“I don’t know.”
“It would fit with some of the things I’ve been hearing about her.”
“What have you been hearing?”
Jack couldn’t tell her that Sally tried to hire Tatum to shoot her, since that was a privileged communication from his client. He had to keep it general, as he had in their first meeting in Korhogo. “She just didn’t seem to be terribly afraid of death. And I don’t say that lightly. I understand what she went through. My sense is that she had no reason to go on living after the murder of her daughter. If she had AIDS, she might have felt as though there was no point in prolonging the inevitable.”
“Are you back on that theory you mentioned to me before-that Sally might have hired someone to kill her?”
“It’s not much of a stretch to believe that she’d hire someone to kill her under these circumstances.”
She looked away, and sadness came over her. “I’d be lying if I told you that I hadn’t worried about Sally. But this idea that she would have hired someone to shoot her, I don’t really understand. Why go to all that trouble? Why wouldn’t she have just shot herself?”
“You could have been the reason.”
“You’re blaming me?”
“No, no. Quite the opposite.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Here’s something that might help you understand. A few years ago, I saw a story on television about some Academy Award-winning actress. I forget who it was, but that’s not important. The point is, before she made it big, she was so unhappy that she decided to kill herself. Problem was, she was afraid her friends and family would feel guilty that they hadn’t noticed her depression in time to keep her from committing suicide. So she tried to hire a guy to shoot her, make it look like a random murder. The gunman talked her out of it.”
“So you think Sally…”
“I think she might have found a less compassionate hit man.”
“Do you have any idea who it might have been?”
Jack looked across the street. Theo was dancing with two women, laughing, waving his arms, and having a good time. It suddenly reminded him of the talk he’d had with the detective on Sally’s case, who’d tried to warn him that Tatum was nothing like his brother Theo.
“That’s what I need to sort out,” said Jack.
Thirty-seven
Kelsey was steeped in murder-all of its elements, from malice aforethought to the mortal wound.
Criminal law had been her favorite first-year course, and she’d spent probably more hours than necessary boning up on it over the last few weeks. She was devoting more and more time to the Sally Fenning case, and the media were starting to make it sound as though the police were narrowing their suspects. If an indictment was headed in the direction of Jack’s client, she wanted to second chair the trial-but only if Jack thought she knew her stuff.
She took one last gulp of cold coffee and closed her books. The University of Miami Law Library was open till midnight, and she’d closed it down again. The vacuum cleaners were already humming across the carpet, and some frantic law-review type was cursing at a photocopy machine that had been switched off for the night.
“Good night, Felipe,” she said to the ponytailed undergrad who worked behind the desk.
“Night,” he said.
She passed by the sensors and exited through the double doors to the courtyard. The night was cool, so she laid her book bag on the bench to pull on her sweatshirt. It had been crowded when she’d arrived for her night class, so she’d parked at the far end of the student lot near the intramural fields. She had to cut across the campus to get there, and she didn’t give it a second thought until she reached a dark
K stretch of sidewalk beneath a cluster of huge banyan trees. The sun had been shining when she’d arrived, and it was a very different walk at midnight. The thick canopy overhead blocked out the moonlight, streetlights, light of any sort. There were only shadows ahead, different shades of black. Banyans were strange, eerie trees with ropy roots that hung from branches and reached for the ground like long tentacles. Kelsey wove her way through them, dodging the hanging roots like a slow-motion slalom skier. She missed one in the darkness, bumping straight into it and giving herself a start. She took a step back and tried to collect herself, but her pulse raced. Halfway through the banyans, she suddenly felt the urge to turn and run back. She forced herself forward, only to meet another dangling root. It tangled in her hair and made her whole body quiver. She pushed it aside and hurried forward, swinging her arm like a machete through the jungle. Her pace quickened, and she was nearly at a dead run when she slammed into something that brought her to a halt and took her breath away.
One hell of a root.
She gathered herself up and started forward, but as quickly as she rose she was down again. She was about to scream when he pounced on top of her. His knees were on her belly, and she was flat on her back.
“Don’t move,” he said in a coarse whisper.
He talked as if he had a wad of cotton in his mouth to disguise his voice. There was barely enough light to see that he was wearing a ski mask, but the gun in her face was plainly visible.
“Don’t hurt me,” she said, her voice shaking.
“I hope I don’t have to.”
“Please, take my purse, whatever you want.”
“You got forty-six million dollars in that purse, honey?”
She felt a pain in her stomach, and it wasn’t just his knees. “What’s this about?”
“You work for Swyteck, and he represents Tatum Knight.”
“That’s right.”
“Tatum is one of the heirs under Sally Fenning’s will.”
“Uh-huh.”
He pressed the barrel of his revolver into her cheekbone. “You got two weeks to change that.”
“Change? I don’t understand.”
“I don’t care how you do it. But in two weeks, I want Jack Swyteck to persuade his client to give up his shot at the inheritance and withdraw from Sally’s game.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“Figure it out.”
“How?”
“I told you. I don’t care how.”
“What if I can’t?”
The gun was still in her face, but she felt something sharp at her ribs, a stabbing sensation that didn’t really hurt, but it definitely made his point. “You get it done, bitch. Or your little boy, Nate, goes the way of Sally Fenning’s daughter.”
She was suddenly breathless, barely able to get out the words. “Please, not my son.”
“Please, my ass. Now, keep this between us. If you go to the police, if you make this public in any way, it’s Nate who pays. Understood?”
A tear ran down her cheek, collecting at the depression from the barrel of his gun.
“Understood?” he said harshly.
“Yes,” she said in a voice that cracked.
In one quick motion, he rose and rolled her onto her belly.
“Count to a thousand before you go anywhere,” he said.
She lay with her face in the dirt, afraid to make a move, too frightened to count as his fading footsteps echoed in the darkness.
Thirty-eight
Tshe next morning Jack went for a run. It wasn’t just about exercise. He wanted to check his phone messages, and it was two miles to the nearest store offering international phone service-cabines téléphoniques, they were called, not really phone booths but private phones for hire. He would have driven, but Theo was off in the Land Rover in search of doughnuts. Rene had warned him that it would be an utter waste of time, but Theo was having one of those bear-like cravings that could have had him scouring a rice paddy for a bag of barbecued potato chips.
Jack was soaked with sweat when he reached the general store at the end of the road. It was early in the day, and he’d run countless hours in Miami summers. That didn’t matter: African Heat, 1; Jack Swyteck, 0. He put his hands on his hips and walked off the side-stitch, wondering for an instant if the sight before him was a mirage. Sure enough, their Land Rover was parked out front, and Theo was sitting on the hood, stuffing his face.