“What kind of gun?” I asked her.
Her eyes flashed. “What difference does that make?”
“Do you know how to disengage the safety on an automatic? Can you do it while you’re bent over a desk being raped?”
“You do a lot of things you didn’t think you could when you’re about to die. I found the gun, and I stood him up, and I shot him.” Her voice had turned brittle, but it wasn’t strong. Even though she was angry, there was still something vulnerable about her, and I couldn’t tell whether it was harder to feel for her or not to feel for her.
“How many times?”
“Three.”
“Was he dead?”
“Oh, yes.”
I turned to Harvey. “This is where you came in.”
“Very well.” He shifted his weight, cleared his throat, and began. “It happened four years ago in March. I remember, because it had been a long winter already, and it was still so very cold. It was evening. I was on my way to see a client, a man who owned a chain of dry cleaners. I was doing his taxes.”
This might have been one level of detail more than I needed, but too much was better than too little. I let him carry on.
“My coat was on, and my hand was on the knob of the door when the phone rang. It was a rule. Once I had my coat on, I would never answer the phone. For some reason, that day I waited, and when the machine picked up, I heard Rachel’s voice.” He gave her a shy, sideways glance. “She was crying.”
“You broke your rule.”
“Yes, thank God. She said she was in trouble and needed my help.”
I wanted to ask if he’d bothered to ask what kind of trouble, but there was no point. Nothing could have drawn Harvey in more than having a chance to be of service, especially to Rachel. “What happened then?”
“I went to the address she gave me. It was an office building in Cambridge. Roger Fratello’s office. She was on the fourth floor. The elevator was out of order, and I had difficulty climbing the stairs. The more I tried to hurry, the harder it became.”
I pictured him trying to make those stairs, crawling on his hands and knees if he had to, to get to her.
“When I got there, she was sitting in a chair, shaking like a frightened animal. Vladislav Tishchenko was dead on the floor. She told me she had killed him. There was blood.” He closed his eyes. “There was much blood.”
“Keep going.”
“It was a nightmare. The entire scene was a nightmare. We rolled the body in…in large plastic bags Rachel found in a janitor’s closet and carried it down the stairs. We put it into the trunk of the dead man’s car. There was money in the trunk, packs of currency and lots of it. I had to move it to fit the body in. I put it in a bag Rachel found that was in the front seat.”
“Was this the money that ended up in Brussels?”
“I assume it was.”
“Then this explains how your prints got on it. You handled it to put it in the bag.” I looked at Rachel. “Did you ever touch it?”
“Harvey handed it to me in a bag. I never touched it.”
“And you gave it to Roger when you helped him run. Is that it?”
They looked at each other. “Yes,” Rachel said quickly. “That’s exactly it.”
I made a mental note to come back to that point. Something wasn’t right.
“All right, Harvey. You had this body in the trunk. What then?”
“I drove Rachel home. I helped her clean up and dispose of her bloody clothes, and then I drove the body out of town and buried it.”
“You buried Vladi?”
“Yes.”
“By yourself?”
“I was not so feeble then as I am now. What else was I to do?”
I raised an eyebrow at Rachel. That was all it took to bring her back to her posture of snide self-defense. “I had blood on my clothes. We also had one car too many. We had to take my car home. But while I was there, Gary woke up. There was no way I could go out again.”
“That was convenient. Did you ever tell Gary what had happened?”
“I never did.”
“You just left Harvey to clean up your mess.”
Harvey cleared his throat and waded in. “Nothing she could have done would have changed what I did.”
I tried to picture the logistics. If they took her car home, that left them with Vladi’s, and Harvey’s still at Roger’s office in Cambridge. “You said you drove Vladi in his own car. What did you do with it?”
“I drove it to the Alewife Park-and-Ride. I wiped off the fingerprints and took the T into Cambridge. Then I walked to my car and drove it home.”
That meant the Cambridge police or the transit authority had found that car. “Neither of you was ever questioned in the investigation?”
Rachel shrugged. “As far as they wanted to know, Roger did it. Vladi disappeared, and then Roger disappeared. They didn’t look too far past him.”
“What did Drazen think?”
Rachel smiled. “He believed what they believed, and he believed me. I told him I had seen Roger kill Vladi. It was the least I could do to that bastard.”
Their story made sense. I couldn’t find any major holes. But then the two of them looked at each other, and I saw something pass between them. They no longer shared the same home, the same name, or the same monogrammed sheets, but Rachel and Harvey still had the ability to understand each other without words. It was one of the vestiges that endure after the end of an intimate relationship. There was more they hadn’t told me.
“What’s the rest?”
Rachel caught the inside of her cheek between her teeth but said nothing. I looked at Harvey. I did not want him to be hiding things from me. Finally, he spoke. “Roger had the incident on video.”
“Excuse me?” I sat forward. Perhaps I hadn’t heard right.
Rachel pulled her top hand off the pile and used it to straighten her blouse. “He had the whole thing. The shooting. The cleanup. He had it all.”
“How did he get it?”
She shrugged as if it should have been obvious. “Surveillance cameras in his office.”
“You were the auditor, and you didn’t know about them?”
“It was a secret camera. Roger put it in himself. No one knew. It was like that Nixon thing. Who cares how he got it? He came to my house that same night and showed me what he had. He told me he would give it to Drazen if we didn’t give him what he wanted.”
“Which was what?”
“To get out of the country with his head, his hands, and his money.”
I closed my eyes and pressed the heels of my hands against the bones just above them. “Let me guess. You called Harvey, who had probably just returned home from burying the body of the man you had killed.”
I opened my eyes. Harvey looked self-conscious. Rachel looked defiant. Maybe I was getting the hang of this silent communication thing. “Harvey, what did you do for Roger?”
“I alerted several banking contacts I had in Europe. I opened numbered accounts for him in Switzerland. I had several fake IDs made for him and set up credit-card accounts in those names. I did what I could to make sure he would have access to his money anonymously and from a distance.”
In short, everything Ling had accused him of, and Baltimore was not just a city in Maryland.
I got up and went to the refrigerator. It had been a while since my cold water had been cold. I grabbed one of the checked dish towels from the oven handle. As I made my own ice pack, I tried to distill the information to its essential elements. I needed to find Roger. If I found him and tried to bring him back, he would no doubt invoke the power of the video. That assumed he still had it after all this time or that it hadn’t burned up in Salanna 809. Or that Ling hadn’t also stumbled across it in a Brussels safety deposit box. If he had, he was keeping it awfully close to the vest. Too close, I decided. If he’d had that kind of leverage, he would have used it on Harvey by now. The safest thing was to assume Roger still had his deadly digital weapon and was still willing to wield it.