“But we checked he duffel bag?”
“Exactly.”
“Oh shit. Which means, Virginia accidently stole the map when she took the money.”
“Yeah, and now she’s at the bottom of the river and we have no way of knowing where the damned money and map went.”
Armstrong picked up the itinerary again. “No, but I know someone who’s currently the prime beneficiary of her good fortune. If anyone knows where the map got to, it will be her father.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sam followed Virginia through the belled door into the diner and they took a seat in a booth on the back wall. Sam scanned the street in the mirror over Virginia’s shoulder while he spoke to the server and ordered coffee for both of them.
Over the course of the next half hour Virginia filled Sam in with every detail of the past twenty-four hours, since her life had been turned upside-down. She told him about the young drug dealer who appeared to have taken his own drugs only to overdose and about stealing the money so that she could fund her father’s experimental treatment. She then explained how the next day she discovered her partner, Anton, had been killed by a stolen garbage truck, finally finishing with the rundown of how she’d been attacked by a different garbage truck on her way to another ambulance station, which was how she ended up in the river.
Sam waited and listened, letting her get it all out. When she was finished, he said, “All right. I have some questions, then we’re going to decide exactly what we’re going to do about all this.”
“Shoot.”
“How old was the kid?”
She raised a curious brow. “The drug dealer?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. Mid-twenties. Possibly late twenties.”
Could it be Senator Perry’s kid?
“Describe him for me. What exactly did he look like?”
A wry smile formed on Virginia’s lips, but she thought about it for a second before she answered. “He looked well groomed, wore an expensive gold watch… a Rolex or something grotesquely expensive. Definitely didn’t look like he’d been doing it hard.”
It definitely could have been the Senator’s son…
Sam persisted. “Was it a gold Rolex or something similar?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Something about a gold Rolex. I’ve seen it on someone recently. I can’t remember where.”
She paused, thought about it. “Yes. It was definitely a gold Rolex, I recall the distinctive five-pronged golden crown, the emblem associated that’s often advertised when you watch tennis.”
“Interesting.” Sam tried to think back to where he’d seen it recently. The Senator was wearing an expensive watch, but nothing stood out in his memory as it being a Rolex. He’d seen photos of David Perry. Had the man been wearing a Rolex?
“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. I’m just trying to work something out. Tom and I were recently asked to help track down someone who recently went missing. For a second I thought the two events might be related.”
“Really. Why?”
“The kid was twenty-eight and the sort of rich kid who’d probably wear a Rolex. It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t him.”
Sam turned his focus into a different direction. “What about the rest of your shift?”
She cocked her left eyebrow. “You want to know what I did on a fourteen-hour shift as a paramedic?”
“Sure. Maybe you were attacked because of something else you did? You have an interesting job. You see a lot of people in vulnerable positions. We already know this has something to do with what you and your work partner did yesterday, so maybe it’s something else. Did you have any unique cases?”
“No. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary. We saved a five-year-old kid’s life after she had a bout of severe asthma. We returned a ninety-five-year-old woman with dementia back to a nursing home, after she was found walking along Fifth Avenue without any clothes on. We attended a guy who was found dead in the gutter.”
“Anything suspicious?”
She smiled. “No. A heart attack.”
“Anyone important?”
“No. Wait… we did look after someone pretty high up in the government who died, but there wasn’t anything suspicious. It just looked like he’d had a heart attack. The detectives only became interested when they recognized the congressional pin.”
Sam sat up and went rigid. “Who exactly was it that died?”
“His name was Arthur… something… Parry I think…”
“Senator Arthur Perry?”
“That’s it.”
“Senator Arthur Perry’s dead?”
“Yeah. He died of a heart attack first thing yesterday morning. Why do you look so concerned? The guy was the epitome of gluttony. It was only a matter of time before he dropped dead.”
“Sure. But I don’t think that’s what killed him yesterday.”
‘You don’t?” Virginia asked
“No. He was murdered.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Virginia let those words hang there silently for a moment.
The waiter arrived through the port-holed kitchen door and placed their lunch in front of them. Burgers, fries, and a soft drink. She took a bite. The burger was fantastic. One of those genuine hand made burgers with a thick patty, tomatoes, lettuce, beetroot, and cheese. It probably went a fair way toward clogging her arteries, but right now she didn’t care.
She finished two more bites and then said, “So, you want to tell me why you think Senator Perry was murdered?”
“The Senator approached me four days ago to search for his son who’d gone missing nearly three weeks ago. Something we found in our investigation frightened the Senator. He said that if the message got out, he and his family would be dead. Then he told us to stay where we were and pretend nothing had ever happened, while he caught the next flight out of there to New York, to go and put things right.”
“And so you thought maybe the drug dealing kid was his son and had been targeted, too?”
“The thought crossed my mind.” Sam took another bite of his burger. “But then I dismissed it. The Senator said that his son was an adventurer. There was nothing about him being a drug addict, much less one from New York who made money dealing the stuff. God knows the Senator was wealthy enough that his son never would have needed to make money selling drugs.”
Virginia recalled the Senator’s Hermes shoes. Any kid of his would never have needed to sell drugs. But she also knew with experience that drug addicts didn’t always come from broken families. Some of the wealthiest and most successful people she’d known had become hooked on some sort of addiction. The only difference between them and those who aren’t so well off was that the rich could afford good quality drugs.
Rich kids don’t generally overdose.
Her focus kept shifting fractionally in and out. The shape of her mouth changing, as if she was constantly thinking. There was something important there, she just couldn’t quite reach it. Rich kids buy high quality drugs, which aren’t laced with additional chemicals, and as a consequence, they don’t die as frequently as the drug addicts on the street.
Virginia smiled. “He wasn’t a drug addict!”
“What?”
“The kid. He wasn’t a drug addict.”
Sam asked, “How do you know?”
“Professional gut instinct, but I can tell you with some level of certainty, he wasn’t a regular heroin user.”
“Go on.”
“His teeth were white and well cared for, which suggests he’s never become dependent on methadone — the drug used to help wean heroin addicts of opium — and his arms didn’t have track marks.”