“Sure,” I said, happy to shift gears. He offered me a seat again, and we each took a matching armchair, facing each other.
“Let’s start with this sequence of threatening messages,” he said, a yellow legal pad in his lap.
I gave him the longer version of the money-burning ceremony at Sal’s Place, the flaming package, the most recent text-and finally the FBI’s discovery of the listening device in Sonya’s car.
“Looks like Chuck Bell may have been right,” said Kevin.
“How so?”
“If someone is bugging the general counsel’s Mercedes, maybe your identity theft is linked to a larger attack against Saxton and Silvers. I’ll follow up with the FBI.”
“You want me to be part of that?”
“Negative. I don’t want you talking to law enforcement.”
“Did you hook up with the detective who came by my apartment?”
“I did.”
“Does he think I killed Chuck Bell?”
“I’m not sure. It may have been just a pretense, but he said the reason he went to your apartment was to follow up on the incendiary package you received yesterday morning. They have an interesting lead. It was white phosphorous, which is pyrophoric.”
“What does that mean?”
“It ignites simply when exposed to the air. The police presume it was inside some kind of vacuum-sealed plastic liner, and when you tore open the package-poof. Flames. Once it combusts, it’s hard to extinguish.”
“I’ll vouch for that.”
“Highly toxic, too. You’re lucky you got out of that elevator so quickly.”
“So what leads are the police chasing?”
“White phosphorous is very hard to get your hands on, unless you have something to do with the munitions business. Russian or Israeli, most likely.”
“Munitions business? Doesn’t sound like anybody I know.”
Kevin pulled his trusty Mont Blanc from his breast pocket, ready to take notes. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” he said. “Let’s start at the beginning.”
I talked, and my brother occasionally jotted down a word or two. At nine forty-five he let me switch on the television for a quick market check. FNN was broadcasting in split-screen format, an aerial view of the Chuck Bell homicide scene on one side, the NYSE trading floor on the other, as if to pose the question, Can you name the real crime scene? We had the sound muted, but the news was clearly bad on both sides.
SAXTON SILVERS DOWNWARD SPIRAL CONTINUES IN HEAVY TRADING, read the banner at the bottom of the screen.
FNN FAMILY IN SHOCK OVER DEATH OF BELOVED COLLEAGUE, the next banner read.
Kevin said, “Tell me more about the e-mail from Mallory.”
I looked away from the flat screen. “Mallory studied drama at Juilliard,” I said.
“I think I knew that,” said Kevin.
“She has a flair for performing. Every now and then, she would send me an e-mail that was kind of sexy, kind of funny. This one was an early ‘happy birthday’ video. It was a parody of Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Happy birthday, Mr. President’ to JFK.”
“You have political aspirations?”
“No. But the joke was that she always thought I would someday have Eric Volke’s job-president of Saxton Silvers.”
“So you opened the attachment to her e-mail?”
“It was from her regular e-mail address, so I had no reason to question it. But Elliot-that’s my tech guy-tells me that’s where the spyware came from.”
Kevin scribbled a thought on his legal pad, then looked up. “I’ve seen lots of spying in divorce cases.”
“But why would Mallory plant spyware in a way that could be so easily traced back to her e-mail address?”
“Not too technically savvy, maybe?”
“Granted, she’s not a computer genius, but she’s not stupid. We live together in the same apartment. She could have just crawled out of bed one night and loaded the spyware on my laptop.”
“Maybe she didn’t think she had the technical expertise to load the spyware correctly, so she hooked up with some fifteen-year-old geek to plant it by e-mail.”
“Or the guy who sent me the text message.”
“Let’s not focus too much on how it was planted. The key point here is that if the spyware can in fact be traced back to your wife, then your identity theft claims don’t add up.”
“Why not?”
“Think about it. You want people to believe that someone planted spyware on your computer, stole your passwords, wiped out your bank accounts, and masterminded a complicated short-selling scheme against Saxton Silvers in a financial scandal that has rocked Wall Street-setting you up as the bad guy. Do you actually expect me to walk over to Federal Plaza and tell the FBI that the person behind all that is Mallory?”
“She could have had help.” I didn’t know why I was pushing this angle; I guess I had nothing else.
“It seems much more likely to me that Mallory planted the spyware for the same reason most married people plant spyware: to find out if she was married to a cheater.”
He was making too much sense to argue.
Kevin said, “Did Mallory worry about another woman?”
“No,” I said, then caught myself. “At least not a living one.”
Kevin did a double take.
“No, I don’t mean that,” I said, then I paused. “She always harbored jealousy over Ivy.”
“Did you two talk about that?”
“Not very often. At least not until recently.”
“How did it come up?”
I told him about the passwords being tied to Ivy’s birthday and how that had set Mallory off. “She said I haven’t given up hope that Ivy’s alive,” I added.
There was silence. This was dangerous territory between my brother and me. As Kevin knew, even after the shark had been dissected, I continued to have doubts about what really had happened to Ivy. Kevin had stepped in and pushed the assumed role of “big brother” way too far, doing whatever was necessary to deliver the tough-love message: “Ivy is dead, and you need to move on.” I could have handled that, but what drove the wedge between us came later, after the police had asked me to take the lie detector test. “I’m talking to you as a lawyer now,” he’d told me. “If something happened-if you did something you regret-you can tell me. You need to tell me.”
It wasn’t so much what he’d said as the way he’d said it. It was clear to me that-at least at that moment-my brother was more than entertaining the thought that I had killed Ivy. And that was okay in his mind because he was being a lawyer. He had absolutely no clue how that changed his being my brother.
He still thought I was jealous of his family trip to Paris twenty years ago.
“By the way,” I said, reminded of something from yesterday. “The FBI asked if I would take a polygraph exam about the identity theft.”
“I’ll tell them to forget it,” he said. “If you pass, the government will say it’s not reliable; if you fail, you’re their prime suspect.”
It was another awkward moment. Kevin had made his skepticism about polygraphs clear four years ago, when I’d passed the one during the Ivy investigation.
Kevin rose and moved to the leather chair behind his desk, suddenly more comfortable with a big antique oak barrier between us.
“Let’s shift gears,” he said. “Kyle McVee.”
“What about him?”
He flipped back a few pages in his notes. “You said that when McVee dropped you off this morning, his parting words to you were ‘Nothing personal.’”
“Twice he told me that.”
“Do you believe him?”
I thought about it. “I don’t think Kyle has had a ‘personal’ feeling toward anyone since his son died.”
“What’s the story there?”
“Marcus McVee was the heir apparent at Ploutus, about my age. Not a bad guy, actually. Completely unlike Kyle’s nephew-Jason Wald-who now seems to be next in line.”