Lucy and J. C. were softening. I could see it around their eyes that had morphed from skeptical slits to moist, round pools. Any minute, one of them would put her hand on the girl’s shoulder and she would own them. She’d be off and running, spinning another tale that had elements of the truth in it, but could not strictly speaking be called the truth. I reserved judgment until I heard all of this version.
She had spent over a year stalking her father by the time she finally approached him. “Can you imagine,” she said, “after all this time, he said he wanted to get to know me.” Wrentham was sounding like less of a rotten, philandering dad. When he refused to simply write her a check, she devised the plan to steal and sell the formula that her mother had been telling her about since Emma was a little girl.
“The formula. God, I heard about that so many times I thought everyone’s father had a formula. I knew what a formula was when most kids my age still thought it was something you gave to babies.” She took a deep breath and went on. “Last summer I contrived to meet Garland Bleimeister,” she said. “It wasn’t hard.”
She said she’d zeroed in on Wrentham’s weak-willed employee, a sweet, malleable boy with a few addictions of his own—food and poker. She convinced Garland to steal the formula.
“He’d already been doing it. Sort of.”
For the past three years whenever Garland took the professor’s produce to market, he also stashed a couple of contraband containers of the pest repellent.
“He sold a concentrated solution for a hundred dollars a jug out of the back of his car.”
“To consumers?” I asked.
“No. To one person. I don’t know who. The buyer diluted and repackaged it. Garland didn’t think my father would ever find out.”
“And it wasn’t much of a leap to go from stealing a few jugs to stealing the formula,” I said.
She nodded.
“He would use part of the money to pay off his gambling debts and he thought we’d use the rest to go away. I just didn’t plan on things turning out the way they did.”
“Were you really going to go away with him?” I asked.
She let out a sigh. “I honestly don’t know.”
When Garland didn’t show up for their Thursday dinner meeting, Emma thought he’d gotten cold feet, and she resolved to go through with the plan herself. She didn’t know he was already dead, and the buyers didn’t know Garland had a partner until Emma contacted them.
“Then I saw the paper with the news that Garland’s body had been found. Once I realized they’d killed him I just wanted out of here, but I needed to make sure there was no way for them to connect me to him. I didn’t care about the formula. I could go back to my father anytime—as long as I was alive. I tried to make people think Jamal was Garland’s partner.” It was the first time she looked or sounded contrite. “I just needed to check Garland’s bag. He had said you probably still had it and I wanted to make sure there was nothing in it that connected me to him.”
“So was the magic formula in there?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Garland had it on a flash drive. He kept it with him always. Maybe deep down he knew it was the only thing that kept me sticking around.”
“So you didn’t even have the flash drive and were going to try to make a deal?” Her expression barely changed, as if to say, yeah, so?
“Did you take the bag and toss it in the sarcophagus?”
“No. I was going to go back to the convention center for it, but I got nervous. I started to wonder if Garland had talked to you about me. That’s why I called you and pretended to be Cindy. To check you out and see what you knew.”
“I’m the least of your problems. You do know these people probably also killed a janitor at the convention center.”
“Okay,” Lucy said. She stood up and slapped her hands on her thighs. “Now we call the cops. Killer shoes, killer apps. These I get. Real killers, no.”
“Let’s just hear the rest of Emma’s story,” I said. “Why are you here? What do you want?”
“I’m scared. Now the people we approached keep contacting me.”
“You’ve still never met them?”
She shook her head. She insisted she didn’t know their real names either. They went by Mr. and Mrs. Rose.
“How did you and Garland hook up with them?”
“He said he met the man at some market where he used to bring the produce. They want the formula bad and want to meet me.”
“Just don’t go,” Lucy said. “There’s a concept. Don’t go into the deserted building. Don’t go into the woods at night. Don’t open the door when the scary guy is coming up the stairs. It’s simple.”
“You don’t understand. What am I supposed to do—never open the door again? They know who I am now.”
“How’d they find you?” I asked.
“I don’t know.… Maybe there was something in Garland’s bag. Who knows? I got a text. I thought it was from Gar. It was his number.”
So whoever it was had Garland’s phone. I called Stancik and got plugged into his voice mail. Then I called the precinct to see if anyone knew where he was.
The desk sergeant said he was in New Jersey chasing down a lead; after that he was heading to some fancy-schmancy party in Westchester. “Stan’s probably leaving us to start a private security company for rich people.”
“Is Labidou with him?” He was. That meant it wasn’t purely a social call.
“Emma, where are you supposed to meet Mr. and Mrs. Rose?”
She showed me the address. “Looks like we’re all going to the same garden party.”
“Okay if I join you?” J. C. asked.
“Sure. You can remind us to watch our backs.”
Fifty-seven
It was a tight fit in the Jeep with me, Lucy, Emma, J. C., and Spade and Archer. One sharp turn and I could skewer a passenger.
“Someone rest your hand on that thing so it doesn’t flop around too much,” I said.
“I’ll do it,” J. C. said. “I feel naked going into a questionable situation without my iron bar anyway.” It was rare to hear from a woman who missed her weapon.
A phone rang, and three women fumbled in their bags. I stuck to the driving. The party had started without us, but with as many guests as Jean Moffitt invited I didn’t think we’d be noticed or reprimanded if we arrived fashionably late.
The phone kept ringing. It was mine. Lucy retrieved it from my bag, pushed Answer, and held it to my ear so I could keep driving.
“I just landed.”
I’d almost forgotten about Wrentham. I got off the phone and said nothing to the others but Lucy remembered that he was flying into the Westchester airport.
“Okay. We have to make a stop and we’re gonna need to make room for another passenger back there.” The airport was thirty minutes away as long as I didn’t make a wrong turn. Lucy quietly reset the GPS.
We stopped for gas and a much-needed pee break. Emma and I made an uneasy truce and positioned Spade and Archer on the roof of the Jeep while the others went to the restroom. We wedged an old fleece jacket that I kept in the car for emergencies underneath the piece to keep the noise level down and to prevent the sculpture from bending. Then we threw a tarp over the whole thing and attached it with bungee cords.