Douglas tightened the grip on his wife's hand, but Caroline was beyond sorrow. The daughter of a smiling psychopath, she said to herself. That is what I am. Maybe she would feel sorrow later, when the numbness had passed, sorrow and guilt and revulsion against the blood that moved through her veins.
Emilio-hard to think of him as that other name-was going on, but Caroline heard only a part of it. Peddling influence, setting up a distribution network for their cocaine operation, and blackmail, that pool ever widening: business as usual for Claudia, only more so. Then he was saying something about a key.
"-on Ondine's body. Hilda obviously didn't know that Ondine had the thing, or she'd have retrieved it, but the key seems to have passed through several hands before the girl got it. Howard Fondulac's fingerprints were on it, so Ondine may have been given it by him, or maybe she found it when she was trying to get him untangled from the Pilates machine.
"I doubt we'll ever be certain. I do know that Ondine told David she would see him in his cabin tonight. I assume she would have given him the key then, to give to Lauren, whom Ondine did not wish to be seen with too often. Ondine knew that Lauren was looking for the key to a safe and thought this might be it; she had no way of knowing that David had an interest in the contents of that safe as well."
"But did she know?" Caroline interrupted. "Did Ondine know that her mother was…?"
"Lauren told her the first night. They pretended to be strangers whenever there was a chance someone might overhear, but, yes, she knew where she came from."
That was who she'd seen with the model, Caroline realized, on the other side of the moonlit lake. Laughing or sobbing-or, more likely, both. Which also meant that if Lauren Sullivan was Hilda Finch's other, illegitimate daughter, Caroline had spent the first evening here in friendly conversation with her own niece. Those unexpected sparks of sympathy she'd felt for the achingly pretty younger woman were facilitated by blood ties. A spasm of grief took her, and she missed Emilio's next words, unticlass="underline"
"-Finch looks to me a fairly pure example of a sociopathic personality. Without a conscience, her concern for others a learned facade, her only interests self-serving. I haven't had a chance to interview her fully, of course, but I did ask her if she knew she'd killed her granddaughter in Ondine. She did not. There seems to have been a lot that Claudia kept from her silent partner-it was, as I said, more a triumvirate than a partnership. Claudia and Raoul, with the newcomer Hilda Finch anonymous behind the lawyer; all three jostling for power, attempting blackmail to keep the others under control, making temporary alliances against the third, aiming for domination. It is the reason a number of you were brought here, so that Claudia could assemble her victims in a bid for power against the others. Once Hilda Finch revealed herself, warfare was open-with knowledge as the weapon. One of them would feed another information to undermine the third. Hilda, for example, told Raoul about a secret compartment in Mrs. Blessing's cello case; Claudia told Hilda about Raoul's felony record. Raoul may have told Hilda that Claudia had a safe, or Hilda may have figured it out on her own. In either case, Hilda did not know where it was at first, nor did she have the key. In the case of Ondine, it is possible that Claudia herself didn't know the identity of Ondine's mother, since she had not been involved in that adoption procedure. At any rate, Hilda's reaction, when I told her, was chiefly exasperation: She'd been overjoyed to discover that Lauren was hers, not from any maternal urge but because it would be a coup for the spa."
(Vince elbowed his assistant. "I toldja, didn't I? Anyone that didn't care about her own daughter had to be dangerous?" Mike LeMat nodded.)
"Her chief regret for Ondine's death was, I quote, 'Just imagine what I could have done with this place if I'd had both of them.'"
Caroline couldn't even wince. She'd known it was coming, had known since hearing of Hilda's hidden partnership with Claudia that her mother was not just impossible, she was downright evil. Looking back, Hilda must have known that Douglas was being blackmailed, and by what means, yet she had made no move to tell him the truth, to free him from the appalling images in his mind, to free Caroline to be happy in her marriage once again. Caroline studied her hands, feeling every eye in the room on her, the daughter, born to and raised by a creature like that. Only from Douglas did she feel empathy-Douglas and, oddly enough, King David. She straightened her spine and lifted her eyes to meet the tattooed gaze squarely: She did not want this disturbing man's pity.
"The key Ondine found opened one of Claudia's two safes. The one it fit was cleverly hidden inside a storage cupboard in the corner of the conference room Detective Toscana has been using. The other, the reason Claudia de Vries was in the bathhouse at that hour of the night, was in a very clever compartment beneath one of the mud baths. That safe had a combination lock. When we emptied the mud bath, we found the keys to the bathhouse door-you may have seen how heavily locked she kept that building-but not the safe key. That is because Claudia's killer knew there was a safe and recognized the key for what it was. However, either the killer knew as well that the safe was in the conference room and therefore inaccessible until the police cleared out, or else made the mistake of murdering Claudia before finding out where the safe was. Hanging onto the key would have been dangerous-if the police did a complete search of the grounds and found it, they'd know it had something to do with Claudia's death-so the killer gave it to Howard Fondulac. He was a drunk, but he wasn't stupid; he knew that he was being set up to take the fall and in fact told Detective Toscana as much, but he couldn't very well reveal the details without giving away his own illegal activities.
"The only person who fits into this combination of inside knowledge and incomplete details is Hilda Finch. She gave Howard the key, knowing that eventually she could get the location of the safe out of Raoul, but in the end, Raoul did not know his wife had a second safe. The one in the conference room did contain a great deal of moderately secret material, but it was primarily a decoy. The bathhouse safe was where Claudia kept her real treasures-blackmail evidence and correspondence going back more than twenty years: letters, bank statements, blood tests, records of drunk-driving and prostitution arrests for dozens of people. And by the way, the material in both has been seized, but it will remain confidential. You have my word on that, any of you who might be concerned."
Phyllis Talmadge made a small noise and slumped into her chair, causing those around her to speculate what sort of document bearing her name might be inside one of those safes.
"Anybody got a cigarette?" Phyllis asked the room at large. When no one reached for a pack, she sighed gustily. "You know, until three days ago, I hadn't smoked in nearly twenty years. How's that for a health spa?"
(So much for the psychic's testimony that she'd smelled cigarettes before she was conked and thrown in the lake, Vince thought grumpily, leaving his packet firmly in his pocket. She'd been sucking mints to hide not booze but smokes.)
"So," Emilio was finishing up, "you understand why I have told you rather more than I would normally have done, by means of asking you to keep the gossip to a minimum. The press outside does not know of the familial links between several of the famous individuals here, and although the right to privacy is generally regarded in this country as a mild jest, I appeal to you to grant it to those who have already suffered enough. I leave it to your sense of honor. Of course," he added, his voice and eyes going hard as diamonds, "I need hardly add that if I am aware of a leak originating in this room, the DEA will be most attentive to the individual involved, for a long, long time. Thank you for your time, and now I think Detective Toscana will need to take yet another set of statements from a number of you."