Night's Landing

by Carla Neggers

  Leaning back in his chair, Janssen listened to the noise of the street below him. While he wanted to recapture the urge to have a whore, he couldn’t. He could only imagine his mother on her death bed in northern Virginia, calling for her only son—her only child—as she sobbed herself quietly into the grave.

  He let the tears flow unchecked. There was no one to see them, no one in his life who cared or understood that he’d loved his mother.

  “Why?” she’d cried to him over the phone. “Why didn’t you just pay your taxes like everyone else?”

  But his life was so much more complicated than his mother had ever been able to grasp.

  Now he didn’t even dare send money for her headstone.

  The federal government would hound him forever. They’d never let him come home. They’d slap him in cuffs at his poor mother’s grave and stick him in jail until he stood trial. He’d added how many years to his maximum sentence by running? Five years, ten years? He didn’t even know.

  His lawyers had urged him to surrender to U.S. authorities. They’d have been relieved if he’d turned himself over to Rob Dunnemore at the Rijksmuseum.

  But Janssen knew if he went to trial, he’d be convicted, and if he went to prison, he’d never get out.

  If his enemies didn’t rat him out, his so-called friends would. One way or the other, the feds would figure out that tax evasion was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to his crimes.

  And once he was vulnerable, friend and enemy alike would find a way to kill him. He wouldn’t last a month in prison. The federal authorities couldn’t protect him.

  No one would care that he planned to do good with the fortune he’d amassed. If the ends didn’t fully justify the means, he knew he wasn’t a bad man. Look at Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, Hearst. Had they led exemplary lives? They all had skeletons in their closets.

  “Mama, Mama,” he whispered. “What do I do?”

  But there was no answer. She was dead, gone forever.

  Eighteen

  Juliet carried a monstrous spider plant to her kitchen sink and wondered when and where this weird, irritating conversation with Joe Collins would end. She turned on the spray faucet, aware of the senior FBI special agent watching her from the table. The doorman, none too happy, had called ten minutes ago to announce her unexpected “guest.” Collins had requested a bit of her time to ask her a few questions, and when she’d said okay—what other choice was there?—he’d parked himself at her table and told her to continue with what she was doing.

  Watering plants. Lots of plants.

  The life of a real, live deputy U.S. marshal.

  Since Collins was from New York, he had to know that even a small apartment on the Upper West Side was still an expensive undertaking, well beyond what she could afford. It wasn’t so great by suburban standards. The bathroom had a view of a brick wall. The living-room windows were constantly blackened by soot. There was no garbage disposal. But the building had a fantastic location, it had an elevator, it had a doorman—what was not to like?

  And, for her, it was damn near free thanks to a generous friend who was in L.A. on some theater project for at least six months.

  Then Juliet, her plants and her fish would have to find a new home.

  She’d explained the friend in L.A. before Collins even asked, which she regretted. It made her sound defensive, as if he had reason to think she was on the take or something.

  He fiddled with an unlit cigarette. “All these plants are yours?”

  “All mine.”

  “You like New York?”

  “I like the work I’m doing here.”

  “You were here first, before Deputy Dunnemore.”

  She wanted to ask Collins what the hell her relationship with Rob had to do with who freaking shot him in Central Park, but decided that wasn’t the way to go. Stay cool. Answer the agent’s questions. She squirted more water down into the spider plant’s roots. “I’ve been in New York eighteen months. Rob got here in February. It was hard to pretend I’m not as driven as I am when we were working out of the same district.” Using her fingers, she wiped dust off the dampened variegated spikes. “We called it quits in March.”

  “Not that I asked,” Collins said.

  She glanced around at him. “You were going to.”

  “How did you two meet?”

  “Rob came up here from Baltimore to collect a prisoner.”

  “It’d be tough, I think, being married to someone doing the same job as me. My wife’s a high-school guidance counselor.”

  Juliet sighed. There’d never been talk of marriage with her and Rob. “Good for her.”

  “Hardest job in the world. These kids—you just hurt for some of them. Shit lives, shit choices.” Collins rolled his cigarette between his fingers. “Dunnemore. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”

  “Silver plate, not pure silver. The Dunnemores aren’t rich. They’re not poor, either, but the father doesn’t come from money. He was assistant secretary of state once, but, hell, I don’t think he made much more than we do.”

  That drew a half smile from Collins. “You ever make it to the family home in Tennessee? Night’s Landing. Sounds like a nice place, doesn’t it?”

  “No.” She gave the spider plant a final, hard spray. “Never made it.”

  “Sore subject?”

  Rob had invited her down for a weekend in March, a month before his vacation in Amsterdam. Said they could get a jump on spring. She’d worked instead. She could have gotten off—they both knew it.

  End of romance.

  “Not at all,” she told Collins. “Just didn’t work out.”

  “Nate Winter’s down there with the sister. You get a feel for her when she was up here?”

  “Nice. Smart. Pretty. Impulsive. Agent Collins—”

  “She got an anonymous letter in the mail.”

  Juliet grabbed another plant, an orchid she was surprised wasn’t dead yet. As much as she loved plants, they had to be hardy to survive her lifestyle and the tough conditions of her borrowed New York apartment.

  Collins carefully returned his cigarette to his pack, but she noticed it was bent, bits of tobacco spilling out onto the table. She’d let him smoke. She didn’t care. But it broke house rules. For all she knew, her friend had little cigarette smoke alarms all through the place.

  She set the orchid in the sink. She forgot what kind it was, but it wasn’t that pretty when it was blooming and was truly ugly when it wasn’t. She gave an audible sigh. “Okay, is this where I’m supposed to ask ‘what anonymous letter’?” But she immediately regretted her irritable remark. “Sorry. I guess I’m as nerved up about this whole business as anyone.”

  “Feel like you’re next?”

  “No, goddammit. What a thing to say.”

  He shrugged, then told her about the letter. Sarah’s call. Nate’s flight to Tennessee. How she said she’d torn apart the phones looking for taps. Juliet smiled at that one—she had a feeling that, never mind the delicate gold rings and blond good looks, Sarah Dunnemore would do just about anything.

  “You think this letter’s for real?” Juliet asked.

  “Lab guys are checking it out. It was postmarked New York.”

  “What, you think one of us sent it? Rob, Nate, me? The chief deputy?”

  Collins didn’t answer.

  Juliet groaned. Her and her mouth. “Any more questions?”

  “Nah.” He got heavily to his feet. “Thanks for your time, Deputy.”

  After he left, she banged her head on the door a couple of times just to see if she could knock some sense into herself. Jesus. How not to handle an FBI interrogation.

  That was what it was, too. Collins had asked her if he could talk to her. She’d said yes.

  It wasn’t a courtesy visit. He was an FBI agent in charge of a high-profile investigation. The man was just doing his job.

  And he’d been very deliberate about it. No slipups. He’d told he
r only what he’d wanted her to know—what he wanted to see her reaction to.

  He’d played her beautifully.

  But who cared? She had nothing to hide. He had to work all the angles of the investigation at once. Crazy ones, even. Like maybe Rob or Nate had screwed up and done something that’d gotten them shot. Like maybe she had a vendetta against Rob and had hired someone to take him out.

  Except he hadn’t died, and neither had Nate.

  Maybe dead wasn’t the point. Maybe dead or wounded was the point.

  Why?

  The letter Sarah had received…what was that all about?

  “Not your problem.”

  Juliet flipped all the locks on the door and picked up an ivy plant with crispy leaves. She must have missed that one her last go-round with the spray faucet. But it still showed signs of life. Her brothers would tell her she was losing her touch—she’d always had a green thumb.

  She noticed a little goldfish belly-up in one of the tanks. Damn. She set the ivy on the sink and found a slotted spoon, scooped out the dead fish and flushed it down the toilet, then flipped the lid and sat down.

  “Oh, shit.”

  But she couldn’t stop the tears. For the first time since she’d heard the news about the shooting, she sat and cried. She’d loved Rob. Totally. And it hadn’t worked out, just like all her other relationships. Then he’d almost died. He was still in rotten shape. Miserable, in pain. He had to be scared out of his mind for his sister.

  Would he turn to her for help?

  Hell, no.

  She looked out the window at the brick wall and listened to the gurgle of her aquariums. This was it. She was going to spend the rest of her life with a bunch of plants and fish for company.

  And her work. God knows she’d have her work.

  Nineteen

  Ethan lit his first cigarette in eight months. Charlene used to harp on him for smoking, but he’d always believed something would get him before smoking did.

  Something got her, instead.

  Someone.

  It was dusk, the sky muted and purplish against the darkening landscape of trees as he walked up the path from the river and across the overgrown lawn of the Poe house. The mosquitoes were out. One buzzed around his head. He heard crickets chirping in the tall grass, boats puttering down on the river. He had his Smith & Wesson strapped to his right ankle and one of his Brownings tucked in a belt holster under his Titans shirt. No damn overalls tonight.

  He didn’t plan on killing anyone, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t prepared.

  There were rumors on the river that the Poe House Trust was considering selling off some of the acreage lots to country-western music stars, to raise money for a visitors’ center. But even understated development would change the isolated, rural character of Night’s Landing, make it harder to visualize the kind of lives the Poes had led there since the Civil War. The rumors weren’t true, but if they were, Ethan figured Sarah Dunnemore would have a fit. Yet locals also said she couldn’t stay steeped in the Poe house the way she had been for some years. She had to leave its future to other people, people who were more objective, who didn’t have such a personal involvement.

  Leola and Violet Poe had died within two years of each other more than a decade ago. They’d lived to see the boy they’d raised move into the Tennessee governor’s mansion, but not the White House. People said they’d had mixed feelings about John Wesley—that was what the sisters had always called him—entering politics, even leaving Night’s Landing.

  Ethan ducked past twin dogwoods in the front yard and headed up the back road that led to a down-on-its-luck fishing camp. After a hundred feet the pavement turned to gravel. He could hear his running shoes crunching, but stealth wasn’t an issue, not tonight. He didn’t care who the hell saw him, who heard him.

  It was an old-fashioned camp with a row of a half-dozen, one-room cabins with shed roofs and no frills. Conroy Fontaine struck Ethan as a frills type. But maybe he was saving himself for when he hit it big with his book. Maybe he’d do damn near anything, including sleep on a moldy horsehair mattress, to get what dirt he could on President Poe.

  Poe hadn’t lived in Night’s Landing in years. He and his wife had a place in Nashville. Nothing huge. A Victorian they’d fixed up. The Poe House wouldn’t be open to the public for another couple years, at least. By then, maybe someone would have torched the fishing camp up the road. Each cabin had its own rusted lawn chair and ancient charcoal grill. The smell of smoke and trout hung in the air, fishy, not anything Ethan would want to eat.

  He stopped at the main office and asked a very overweight woman with a long, greasy gray braid which cabin Conroy Fontaine had rented. She didn’t hesitate. “Last one on the left.”

  Ethan passed three empty cabins before he reached the last one on the left. A light was on. The front door was open. He could see Fontaine sitting at a table in the front window. Ethan threw down his cigarette, stamped it out and kicked in the screen door.

  He grabbed a stunned Fontaine up off his chair, twisted his right arm around to the small of his back and shoved him face first into the refrigerator. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “All right. Calm down.” Fontaine’s voice squeaked, but he still had the southern accent, which meant it was probably for real. “We can talk.”

  Ethan patted him down. No weapons, but the guy was fit as hell. “Sit. Move any way I don’t like, you lose teeth. Come at me, you’re in the hospital. Try to hurt me, you’re dead.”

  “Heavens, man. You’re some gardener.”

  Bravado. Fontaine gave himself a little shake, as if to loosen himself up, and sat back at the table. It was rickety, covered with a cigarette-burned yellow vinyl cloth.

  Ethan reached over to a stack of papers on the table and lifted out a picture of a silver-haired man. A mug shot, pulled off the Internet.

  Nicholas Janssen.

  Ethan shoved the picture at Fontaine. “Who’s this?”

  “You know already, don’t you?”

  Janssen was an international fugitive, a rich idiot who was supposed to be in prison for tax evasion by now. Three weeks after Charlene’s murder, Ethan had followed Betsy Dunnemore to an Amsterdam café where she’d run into Nicholas Janssen. Accidentally, on purpose—Ethan didn’t know which. She and Janssen had coffee. Talked. Heatedly. Then went in separate directions. Before her death, Charlene had met with Betsy Dunnemore. It was one of the pieces Ethan had. He knew it fit into his puzzle—he just wasn’t sure where.

  “I ask the questions,” he told Fontaine.

  “When we’re done here, I’m calling the police.”

  “Fine with me. Your interest in this guy?”

  “Journalistic. I think there’s a connection between him and President Poe.”

  Ethan sneered at the guy in disgust. “You really are a bottom feeder.”

  Fontaine rubbed the elbow that Ethan had jerked. “Why are you picking on me? I’ve done nothing. Are you upset over the feds who were crawling through the Dunnemore house today? I was going to stop by and talk Sarah into sharing her prune cake, but when I saw them, I thought better of it.” He made a face. “I’m not proud of myself, I have to say. A better friend would have made sure she was all right.”

  Ethan had made himself scarce when the feds were at the house, but only after he’d figured out what was wrong—Sarah had received a threatening note. He could picture it, the letter with the New York postmark. He’d pulled it out of the mailbox himself and set it on the table.

  He should have opened it.

  Sarah hadn’t come to him for help—why should she? He was the mild-mannered, songwriting good ol’ boy.

  The feds hadn’t talked to him. They hadn’t talked to Fontaine.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Ethan glanced at Janssen’s handsome face. “Does Sarah Dunnemore know this guy?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to find out, but it’s—” He paused, choosing his words. “It’s a sensitive su
bject. He and her mother…” He drifted off.

  “You think they’re having an affair? You really are scum.”

  “He’s a lonely man. Janssen lives in Switzerland surrounded by bodyguards—he’s afraid federal agents will drop out of nowhere and kidnap him back to the U.S. to stand trial. His mother died over the winter. He couldn’t come back for her funeral.” Fontaine stretched out his legs, folded his hands on his stomach as if he had nothing to fear. “I don’t believe Mr. Janssen thinks things through, do you? He’d fit in around here.”

  “You’ve been sniffing around Janssen and the Dunnemores for this book of yours?”

  “I made a whirlwind trip to Europe in April. A tax-deductible research trip. Rob Dunnemore was in Amsterdam visiting his parents. He snubbed me. Sarah hadn’t arrived yet.” Fontaine spoke matter-of-factly, as if this sort of thing was par for the course in his line of work. “I decided to try my luck again here in Night’s Landing. I was here briefly last fall, trying to decide whether or not I even wanted to take on this project. Now, Mr. Brooker, I believe I’ve answered all the questions I’m going to. Whatever angles I’m pursuing are my business. I’m a legitimate journalist.”

  “Bullshit. What are you, a political hack looking for dirt on the president?” Ethan didn’t wait for an answer. “A bounty hunter? Is there a reward for reeling in Nicholas Janssen?”

  Fontaine glanced up at him. “What’s your interest in Mr. Janssen?”

  “None. I read the papers.”

  “I’ve told you what I know. You have no reason to behave this way, barge in here, threaten me—”

  “I haven’t threatened you. I’ve just scared the hell out of you.” Ethan gave him a cold grin. “There’s a difference, you know.”

  “Please, leave, Mr. Brooker. Don’t make me call the police.”

  Ethan was tempted to toss the place, but he doubted he’d find anything that would lead him anywhere but down more blind alleys and to more dead ends. Whether Conroy Fontaine was a legitimate journalist, a bottom-feeding journalist or something else entirely, he had his own agenda in Night’s Landing. He wanted Ethan to find the picture. Fontaine expected one of them to confront him at some point. Sarah Dunnemore. Nate Winter. He was prepared. Stir the pot a little by having Fontaine’s pictures at the ready. See how people reacted. It was a tactic Ethan understood.