“This is my life’s work,” he said.
“I understand.”
“No, you don’t. Have you ever wondered how I got these scars?”
Of course he had. “Not really,” said McVee.
“It has to do with money.”
“Doesn’t everything?”
“This was a very special kind of money,” Burn said, his Indian accent suddenly more noticeable. “Dowry. It still exists in some parts of my country. If a bride’s family doesn’t deliver as promised, that can be very dangerous for a new wife. The husband might even take her into the kitchen or garage, douse her with kerosene, and burn her alive. Happens about every ninety minutes in India. It happened to my sister.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“So was her husband after I caught up with him. That was my first experience with homemade napalm. I got the job done,” he said as he pulled back the hood, exposing his melted ear. “But it didn’t go perfectly.”
McVee sat in silence.
Burn tightened his stare. “Everything since then has gone perfectly. Everything.”
“I’m sure.”
Burn pulled up the hood and put on his sunglasses. “Michael Cantella’s freedom is only temporary. He’s holed up with Ivy’s mother in a motel over in Jersey. Your nephew is watching him as we speak. The minute Cantella makes a move, I’m on him. There is no doubt in my mind that he will lead me to Ivy Layton. Then they’ll both be toast. Literally.”
“You should have just put a gun to Cantella’s head and threatened to blow his brains out if Ivy didn’t show up in thirty minutes.”
“Wouldn’t have worked. Even if we could get a message to her, it’s not like a normal kidnapping. We can’t say, ‘We have your husband, give us a million bucks.’ Ivy knows that what we’re saying is, ‘We have Cantella, now come here and get him so we can burn you both alive.’ She’s not going to walk into that. We need Cantella to lead us to her.”
“There’s logic to that,” said McVee.
“Of course there is. Trust me. This is going to go perfectly.”
The limo stopped. McVee pulled an envelope from his breast pocket. It was filled with cash.
“Money to Burn,” he said, handing over the envelope. “If you don’t wrap this up soon, I may have to create a special expense category on my balance sheet.”
Without a word, Burn opened the door, climbed out, and left McVee alone in the back of the limo.
50
I DIALED PAPA’S CELL FROM THE MOTEL LANDLINE. I GOT HIS VOICE-MAIL greeting:
“I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but I’m either away from my phone or still trying to figure out how to use this damn thing. Please leave a message.”
I waited for the beep. “Papa, I called the airline, and they tell me your plane landed in L.A. an hour ago. The hotel says you haven’t checked in yet. I want to make sure you’re okay. I’ll keep trying, but if you see an incoming call from my old number, don’t answer. Someone stole my cell.” I paused, realizing that my message was sounding a little scary. “Anyway, I’m hard to reach, so just call Kevin and let him know you’re okay. Bye, love you.”
I hung up and looked at Olivia.
“Still can’t reach your grandfather?’ she said.
“No. And the airline won’t even tell me if they were on the flight. It’s some sort of security policy.”
“He probably forgot to turn his cell back on after landing.”
That was more than likely. But with all that had happened, there were less benign possibilities. “I feel like I’m in an information dead zone in this motel. I need to get out of here.”
“We can’t go anywhere. We’re being watched.”
“How do you know?
“McVee’s men let you go last night only because they’re betting that you’ll lead them to Ivy.” She walked to the window and crooked her finger to part the draperies an inch. As best I could tell, we had a view of a graffiti-splattered concrete wall with Tonnelle Avenue beyond.
“They must be out there watching,” she said.
“So you don’t know,” I said. “You’re assuming.”
“It’s why we’re safe-at least for a little while. The cops can’t find us if we stay put, and McVee won’t touch us so long as they think Ivy might show up here, or that we might lead them to her.”
“That means I didn’t hurt anything by telling Kevin to give McVee’s name to the FBI.”
“In the short run, no. In the long run, you pretty much cinched it that they’ll kill all of us. I just hope it’s not at the hands of Ian Burn.”
Burn had told me his name last night, but I hadn’t shared it with Olivia. “How do you know Ian Burn?”
“How do you think?”
“I’m through guessing.”
She put her foot up on the bed and rolled up her pant leg to the knee. The scar on her shin bone wasn’t that big-about the size of a half dollar-but the crater was deep and grotesque, as if the flames had burned into the bone.
“I’ve met him,” she said.
I was speechless. I’d heard that women had a higher pain threshold than men, but napalm burning a hole into your shin had to be even beyond childbirth.
“I’m sorry, Olivia. When did that happen?”
“After Ivy’s memorial service.”
“Burn paid you a visit?”
She nodded. “My decision to cremate Ivy’s remains and scatter them in the ocean made McVee suspicious. He seemed to think that I was trying to close the book on any further DNA testing. He was right, of course. But when Burn couldn’t get anything out of me, that served as confirmation enough that Ivy was really dead.”
“Back up a sec,” I said. “How did you get the first DNA test to come back with a match for Ivy?”
“We’re talking about a crime lab in the west Caribbean, Michael. Think of the Natalie Holloway case-that young girl from Alabama who went to Aruba on a high school graduation trip and vanished from the beach one night. Never found a body, no charges ever stuck. The incompetence on some of those islands is surpassed only by the corruption. Money talks.”
“So…whose body was inside the shark?”
“There never was a body,” she said. “It was two pelicans and a half-eaten dolphin.”
“So the ashes that we scattered were what?”
“Flipper and his flying friends. I know that sounds crazy, but the shark was an afterthought. The plan we originally came up with was for Ivy to disappear, lost at sea. But we were afraid that McVee would never stop looking if there was no body.”
“So the shark with the phony human remains was a way to have a body without having a body.”
“Right. Kind of an interesting story how the shark idea came to her. Ivy attended an art exhibit with Marcus McVee before his suicide.”
“With Marcus?”
“She worked for him, Michael. Anyway, the exhibit included that Damien Hirst piece, a dead shark suspended in formaldehyde in a vitrine. A fourteen-foot tiger shark, to be exact-‘something big enough to eat you,’ was what Hirst was after. I think Steven Cohen eventually paid eight million for it.”
Cohen was a hedge-fund superpower who had amassed a collection valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Marcus McVee was kind of a mini-Cohen. For some of these hedge-fund guys, art was a passion. For others, art was simply the new precious metaclass="underline" a material object that was valuable, available only in limited quantities, and sellable in a recognized market.
I was still processing all that-including the fact that Ivy had gone to an art exhibit with Marcus McVee-when Mallory’s cell rang, displaying Kevin’s number. I let it ring through to voice mail and dialed Kevin on the landline.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Nana and Papa are missing.”
That was a jolt I didn’t need. “What do you mean, missing?”
“I wasted an hour trying to unravel this, and finally it took a friend in law enforcement to get through the red tape. They never got on the plane.”