Tyler jumped in his seat, fumbled for the walkie-talkie, pressed the call button.
“Scout to Leader, Scout to Leader! Bogie! Bogie!”
If there was one thing Parker hated, it was a wild card, unless the wild card was himself. Davis had called in a ringer, and what the hell was that about? He didn’t need help getting a pack of negatives from one kid, and there was no way he was actually going to pay for them.
He touched the button on his mike. “Roger that. We’ve got a bogie coming in.”
Countdown to showtime.
“You’re a real piece of shit,” Jace said.
Davis didn’t react. “Yeah, people tell me that all the time.” He went to reach inside his coat. “I want a smoke.”
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” Jace ordered.
Davis gave a big sigh. “Amateurs.”
“Yeah,” Jace said. “Amateurs make mistakes. Get jumpy. Pull the trigger when they don’t mean to.”
That smile crawled across Davis’s wide face again. “You want to kill me so bad, you can taste it. Maybe you’ve got a future in my business.”
Jace said nothing. The creep was trying to yank his chain, distract him. His arms were getting tired holding the gun out in front of him. Where the hell was the guy with the money?
Headlights bobbed nearby. He almost made the mistake of turning to look.
The air around them seemed as thick as the ocean. Hard to breathe. The only sound he could hear was the black guy snoring on the park bench.
“Here comes the money, honey,” Davis said.
Parker waited for the new member of the troupe to appear. At Tyler’s alert, his sensitivity to every stimulus heightened to an almost unbearable level. Every sound seemed louder. The touch of the night air on his skin was too much. He was more aware of his breathing, of his heart tripping faster.
His money was on Phillip Crowne.
The daughter, Caroline, may have had motive, but he couldn’t see a girl that age being able to pull it off—having her mother killed, setting up her lover to take the fall, and keeping it all quiet. No. Young women in love were all about passion and drama and over-the-top demonstrations of both.
Nor would Rob Cole have taken the fall for her. Guys like Cole didn’t take responsibility for their own actions, let alone someone else’s. If Rob Cole had thought that Caroline had murdered Tricia, he would have been singing that song at the top of his lungs.
Parker liked the brother for it. Andi Kelly had told him Phillip Crowne had been seen having dinner with his sister the night she was killed. The dinner conversation had been serious. Phillip claimed Tricia had talked about divorcing Cole, but the discussion could just as easily have been about Tricia wanting to blow the whistle on her brother’s siphoning of funds from the charitable trust.
No one had ever been able to prove Phillip had been helping himself—but then, everyone had been focused on stringing up Rob Cole. A celebrity scandal was so much more interesting than plain old vanilla embezzling. There was nothing sexy or exciting about Phillip Crowne, while going after Rob Cole had all the ingredients of America’s favorite pastime: tearing down the idol.
Besides, Rob Cole had motive, means, and opportunity. He’d been right there at the scene of the crime when it had happened. He had no viable alibi for the time of the murder. Parker was willing to bet Phillip Crowne hadn’t gotten more than a perfunctory look from RHD, if that. And it hadn’t hurt him to be the son of one of the most influential men in the city either. Norman Crowne backed the DA. Phillip Crowne and Tony Giradello had known each other since law school.
If Eddie Davis and Lenny Lowell had been blackmailing Phillip, was it such a stretch to imagine Phillip Crowne going to his old buddy Giradello for a favor? It wasn’t that difficult for Parker to imagine Giradello selling justice to Crowne. There wasn’t a man on the planet hungrier or more ambitious than Anthony Giradello.
All of it fell into place like the heavy, glossy pieces of an expensive puzzle. Giradello couldn’t let a couple of mutts like Davis and Lowell bring down his well-heeled pal, or ruin the trial that would make his own name a household word. If he sent in Bradley Kyle and Moose Roddick, who also stood to benefit from convicting Rob Cole, he could manipulate the situation, make it go away.
Parker’s blood went cold at the idea that maybe Kyle hadn’t meant to miss anybody he’d been shooting at in Pershing Square. Davis was a big loose end. Jace Damon had the negatives. Abby Lowell was a wild card.
He had wished for a case to make a comeback. This one was an embarrassment of scandalous riches and human tragedy. He thought of Eta Fitzgerald and her four motherless children, and wished he could trade the case to give her back her life. But the best he could do was nail her killer and the people whose actions had ultimately been the catalyst for her murder.
A figure was walking toward the plaza, toward Davis and Damon. The moment of truth was at hand.
Parker raised his glasses and focused in . . . and the world dropped from under him.
49
Jace didn’t recognize the person coming toward them, coming from behind Eddie. From a distance, the light was too poor. And as the person drew nearer, Jace caught only an on-again, off-again glimpse over Davis’s shoulder.
“This guy had better have the money,” he said.
Davis glanced over his shoulder. Jace kept the .22 trained on him, but pulled it back and held it in front of himself at waist height.
Davis opened his stance, turning a half step so he could see his benefactor and still see Jace from the corner of his eye.
The other person spoke. “Where are the negatives?”
“Where’s the money?” Jace asked, allowing himself only a second to register the fact that the third person in their group turned out to be a woman.
She looked at Davis. “Who’s he?”
“Middleman,” Davis said.
“Can’t you do anything right?”
“I did okay killing Tricia Cole for you.”
“And I paid you for that. And that’s all I’ve done since,” she said. Her voice was tense and trembling and angry. “Pay and pay and pay.”
“Hey,” Davis said. “You want to run with the dogs, that’s how it goes, honey. It’s not like calling a flunky to kill a snake in your yard. You had someone whacked. There’s consequences.”
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said, choking back tears. “It has to stop. I want it to stop. I never meant for all this to happen. I just wanted him to pay. But when do I stop paying?”
“Now,” Davis said. “This is it. Jesus Christ, knock off the waterworks. The kid has the negatives. You pay him his five grand, you pay me my finder’s fee, and that’s the end of it. Cole goes to trial next week. You did your part making sure he doesn’t have an alibi. Giradello can’t wait to hang him.”
“Where’s the money?” Jace asked again, impatient and jittery.
The woman held a black nylon gym bag in her left hand. She swung it out to the side and let go of the handle. The bag hit the ground maybe four feet away.
Jace looked over at it. He nodded to Davis and motioned with the gun. “See what’s in it.”
Davis went to the bag, squatted, and unzipped it. “Here it is, kid. See for yourself.”
Jace took a step to the side and tried to see inside the bag without bending over.
It happened so fast, he barely had time to register the flash of light on the blade as Davis came at him and rammed the knife into his belly.
Parker screamed into the mike, “Go, go, go!” Throwing the binoculars aside, he bolted out of cover and ran.
Even as he shouted, “Police!” Diane Nicholson pulled a gun and shot Eddie Davis in the head.