Jared was a creative, lively kid, sometimes moody, and intensely intelligent. Recently he was obsessed with baseball-collecting baseball cards, reeling off baseball statistics. Sarah was afraid this was some misguided attempt to snag his father’s approval. Bright and intuitive though Jared was, he still hadn’t figured out that whatever he did, it would never be enough. He wanted a father, but in Peter he’d never really get one, and the faster he learned that, the better for him.
A month ago, Sarah found herself recalling, Jared had arrived home late one Saturday afternoon after a day with his father, in tears and visibly bruised. One of his eyes was swollen shut. Sarah gasped and ran out to the street to flag Peter down before he drove off in his clattering AMC Pacer.
“What the hell did you do to him?” she shouted.
“Oh, calm down,” he’d replied. “I threw him a left hook and he forgot to duck, is all. I was trying to show him you gotta use your elbows to absorb the blow.”
“Forgot to duck? Peter, he’s a child!”
“Jerry’s got to learn how to take his lumps. It’s good for him.” To Peter, Jared was always “Jerry” or “little buddy.”
“Don’t you ever do that to him again!” she said.
“Don’t tell me what I can’t do with my son,” Peter said. “You got him taking piano lessons and writing poems, for Christ’s sake. You trying to raise a faggot?” And he gunned the engine and took off down the street.
The microwave beeped, then insistently beeped once more. The milk had boiled over, spilling inside the oven. She mopped up the mess with paper towel, removed the milk skin from the mug with a spoon, and stirred in a little maple syrup.
Then she put on some soft chamber music (the Beethoven piano trios, which, with the Schubert piano trios, she played more than anything else-something else Peter liked to mock her for) and sat in the La-Z-Boy.
She thought of Valerie Santoro, not posed on her bed in the indignity of death, but alive, beautiful, and remembered the last time they’d met. She had talked about quitting “the business,” something she talked about quite a lot recently and getting a “high-powered” job on Wall Street. She’d begun to ask for more and more money so she could quit working-realizing that she was near the end of her career as a call girl and the money wasn’t coming in the way it used to.
Valerie Santoro, rest in peace, was a user who thought she’d finally found her sugar daddy, her ticket out. She affected to disdain the money Uncle Sam gave her, while at the same time angling desperately to get more of it.
Sarah, for her part, had found her own ticket out, or at least up. A good informant boosted your stock immeasurably, but an informant like Val, with access to some of the high and mighty, the high rollers and the mafiosi, was truly a prized commodity.
Now her prized racehorse was dead, and something about the murder didn’t make sense. Prostitutes were more prone to be victims of violence, even of murder, than the run of society. But the circumstances didn’t indicate she’d been killed in the line of her particular kind of duty. It was unlikely that rough trade had been involved.
The cash Valerie had hidden behind the dummy medicine cabinet-the almost five thousand dollars in fifty-dollar bills, cut in half-was persuasive evidence that Val had done a job for someone.
But for whom? If it was Mafia-related, why had the money been left there? Wouldn’t whoever killed her have known about the cash and taken it back? If she’d been killed by elements of organized crime because they’d discovered she was informing for the FBI, where had the money come from? Had she been killed because she’d been an informant?
The FBI normally doesn’t concern itself with homicide, but a case that involved the murder of an FBI informant was a clear-cut exception.
Peter Cronin hadn’t called his ex-wife to the crime scene just to identify a body, and certainly not out of generosity. Well, informants weren’t the only ones who did horse-trading. If Peter wanted access to the FBI’s databases, he’d have to pony up some pieces of evidence himself, like the Rolodex and the address book. He’d deal; he had little choice.
At two in the morning, Sarah climbed the stairs to her third-floor bedroom, got into the extra-long T-shirt she liked to sleep in, and got into bed. Visions of the crime scene flashed in her mind like a gruesome slide show, with snatches of remembered conversation as a disjointed sound track, and not before a good hour of tossing and turning was she able to fall into a fitful, troubled sleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Seven kilometers outside of Geneva, Switzerland, at a few minutes before noon, a late-model, cobalt-blue Rolls-Royce limousine pulled off a small, tree-shaded road not far from Lac Léman and came to a halt at a high wrought-iron gate. Embedded in a stone pillar before the gate was a keypad and speaker. The driver punched in several numbers, and when a voice came over the intercom he identified himself. The iron gate swung slowly inward, and the limousine maneuvered along a macadam-paved access road, through a narrow allée of apple trees that went on as far as the eye could see. At once, the magnificent grounds of an enormous, secluded estate came into view.
The vehicle’s sole passenger was Baumann, dressed impeccably, yet casually, in a tweedy sport coat of black-and-white Prince of Wales plaid over a navy-blue crewneck sweater and white shirt. He had shaved off his beard, and his dark wavy hair was combed straight back, which gave him the appearance of a prosperous young Genevois banker on holiday. He seemed quite relaxed.
Late the previous evening he had been flown into a small, unmarked airstrip outside Geneva. He had journeyed from Cape Town without having legally crossed a single national border-and, therefore, without a trace in any computer records anywhere.
In Geneva he stayed at the Ambassador Hotel, on the Quai des Bergues on the Rive Droite, overlooking the crystal-clear waters of the Rhône and the Pont de la Machine. A suite had already been reserved for him, in the name of a British merchant banker, whose passport he was also given. As soon as he had entered the room, he had jerry-rigged the door to ensure that no one could enter uninvited without enormous commotion. Then he took a long hot shower, and passed out. Late in the morning he was awakened by a call from the concierge, who told him his car was waiting.
Now, languidly staring out the window of the Rolls, he took in the manicured grounds. Hundreds of perfectly trimmed golden yew hedges stretched before him. The grounds, which seemed to go on forever, occupied some fifty acres of prime Lac Léman real estate.
From this distance, he could just make out the thirteenth-century castle that belonged to his host. The castle (restored and renovated most recently in the late 1980s) was said to have once been the home of Napoleon III.
The present owner and occupant of this enormous estate, another sort of Napoleon entirely, was a man named Malcolm Dyson, an American expatriate financier, a billionaire, about whom the world knew very little.
In the last few months, however, Baumann had steadily put together a sketchy portrait of the legendary, reclusive Malcolm Dyson. The confines of Pollsmoor Prison had given him unlimited time for his research, and the prison library had yielded a small amount of public-record information. But the best network of resources by far had been the prison’s inmates, the petty crooks, the smugglers, the shady dealers.