Jack Court slid the black-and-white eight-by-ten photo from an envelope on his desk. Patty and Will were locked in an embrace just inside the open door of his condo.
“A work of art,” Brasco said.
“It’s a good thing the guy who took this owed you a favor.”
Brasco puffed out his chest like a pigeon.
“Sometimes it’s better to have a little bargaining session with a perp than to bust him or, even better, her.”
“Keep your methods to yourself, Wayne.”
“As you can see, they work. Ol’ Gary’d been set up in the bushes opposite Grant’s place off and on for days. This wasn’t exactly what he was looking for, but he’s photographed Ms. Moriarity before, and there she was at five A.M. this morning, all bleary-eyed and sexed out. Given the high profiles of Grant and the managed-care killings, he felt it might have made it all the way to the front page.”
“I’m glad you were able to dissuade him. I have much better uses for this photo.”
“Like payback for a certain colonel.”
“Tommy Moriarity bad-mouthed me out of a promotion I deserved. When we bust the managed-care killer, I don’t want his frigging daughter snagging the headlines. Now, with this photo, there’s not a damn thing Moriarity will do about my taking her off the team.”
“After we get this jerk,” Brasco said, “maybe we should have a little talk with Tough Tommy about a couple of promotions.”
“Maybe we should,” Court said. “Maybe we should at that. So, are we all set with the VDS people?”
“Just about. Later today, they tell me. Believe me, this is the way to go.”
“And they assure you they can do this?”
“That’s what they say.”
“Good enough. Stay on them. So long as they don’t screw things up, we’re all set for tonight. Meanwhile, we’ll keep up the search for Clementine.” Court examined the photo once more. “Cozy little scene, this.”
“I can’t believe Iceberg Patty’s caved in like this. I suspect Tommy’ll do just about anything to protect his little darling from the fallout. I’ll tell you something else, too: Whether it’s drugs or aiding and abetting, or both, Will Grant is dirty. He’s going all the way down with this, and if we’re lucky, she’s going to fall with him.”
With her mood as gray as the afternoon sky, Patty took Route 128 north to Lexington. She had Beethoven’s darkly heroic Third Symphony, the Eroica, playing at almost top volume. Given the disillusionment and the politics of deception that surrounded the piece, it was the perfect choice for the day. This was the masterpiece Beethoven had originally planned to publish as the Bonaparte Symphony when, in 1804, Napoleon turned his back on democracy and the people and crowned himself Emperor of France. In a Beethoven biography she had read not long ago, it was written that, upon hearing of the tyrant’s action, the composer ripped the title page from the score.
Patty knew that Jack Court bore some resentment toward her. Until this latest session, though, she never realized how much. Wayne Brasco and he were always tight, but his behavior today was unconscionable-risky, too, given that Tommy Moriarity could easily quash any advancement for him should he learn about the way his daughter had been treated. Well, she wasn’t going to tell her father anything, but neither was she going to slink off the case on which she had worked so diligently. Brasco, with all the intuition of a mollusk, seemed to be following a script written by the killer. Find Clementine, get the names of her children, and arrest the suckers. It was as simple as that. And maybe it was, too. But Patty’s intuition would not stop crying out that something wasn’t right.
Resting on the seat beside her was a printout with the names and addresses of the four executives that some individual or group had murdered. Assumptions are the detective’s greatest nemeses, her father had once told her class at the academy. When a case isn’t going well, clear your mind of all assumptions and force yourself to go back to the beginning. Patty hadn’t been able to get hold of the widower of Marcia Rising, but Ben Morales’s widow was waiting to meet with her, as was Cyrill Davenport’s. Richard Leaf’s distraught widow had agreed to be interviewed again, but only if absolutely necessary. Patty had decided to leave her for last.
Morales, murdered with a single shot to the head, was victim number one. He was a young, vibrant leader, active in civic affairs, who seemed, on paper at least, to be a man of compassion and character, able to handle wealth and power without making many enemies. It was the descriptions of him by his friends and coworkers that troubled Patty most as her investigation progressed. Marcia Rising, though respected by many, seemed to have been avaricious and ambitious to a fault. Cyrill Davenport was a reserved, methodical, moneymaking machine, who at times showed open disdain for his alcoholic wife. And Richard Leaf was, from what Patty had learned about him, a megalomaniacal, womanizing egoist, who believed he was above most of society’s laws. None of the three would have been a poster child for the managed-care industry, and it was easy to see how the killer might have chosen any of them to be the first victim-but not Ben Morales.
The Morales home, on a quiet, unostentatious street, had a well-groomed front lawn that today featured a bicycle with training wheels lying on its side. Patty had met both of Morales’s young daughters and felt as ill today thinking about what life held in store for them as she had during that initial investigation. Morales’s wife, Wendy, opened the front door before Patty had reached it. She was a trim, fair-skinned blonde who seemed to have aged years in the two months since her husband’s death. She served Patty some tea and willingly answered her questions.
“Does the name Clementine mean anything at all to you?”
“Nothing.”
“How about Marcia Rising?”
“Still no bells. After you called and asked about her, I looked for her name when I cleaned out Ben’s desk at work, then again when I went through his study upstairs. There was nothing.”
Wendy was maintaining her composure, but Patty could see the inestimable pain in her eyes.
“Are you all right to do this?” Patty asked.
“There really is nothing left for me from all this except to help find Ben’s killer.”
“I appreciate that. Okay, how about Dr. Richard Leaf?”
“The latest victim. From what I read in the paper this morning and heard on the news, he’s not a man I would care to know.”
“Me, either.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever read his name or heard Ben mention him, but I didn’t look through all the boxes again after Ben was-after he was killed.”
“Are those boxes still here?”
“Upstairs. It’s fine with me if you want to look through them.”
“I do. How about Cyrill Davenport?”
Wendy shook her head.
“The truth is, I was crying a lot going through Ben’s things, and I don’t think my concentration was really all that good.”
“I understand.”
“If you don’t mind working in his study, I can set you up there. Our nanny is away, but I’ll do my best to keep the girls out of your hair.”
“They won’t bother me.”
“I still can’t believe this, I just can’t. Civic organizations loved him; business organizations honored him.” Her eyes moistened. “Do you know much about him?”
“What you told me when I first was investigating his-his death, and also from interviews I did at his business.”
“He was born in absolute poverty in Mexico.”
“I do know that.”
“And do you know that his company’s worth more than doubled in each of the five years he was the CEO?”
“He sounds like quite a guy.”
As Patty trudged up the carpeted stairs, she suddenly felt a consuming fatigue take hold. This whole investigation had felt like one step forward, two steps back. Now, here she was, all the way back to the beginning.
“Here you go,” Wendy said, gesturing to the carpeted floor in a richly paneled study.