“Is all this true?” Lavonne said quietly.
Harper nodded that it was. All too true.
At the far end of the conference table, Edwin Marburg pressed his hands flat on the table and heaved himself up from his seat.
“I believe I’ve heard quite enough,” he said.
“Oh, I’m almost finished. Just one final reveal.”
“Mr. Westfield,” Marburg said, “in addition to being a very competent actor, you seem to be a man of prodigious cunning.”
Ben nodded his thanks.
“At this moment it would interest me greatly to know if this yarn you’ve been spinning is indeed founded on actual events.”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“You can prove this?”
“We have the video of the murder of Harper’s husband and son. Would you care to see it?”
With a growl, Albion pushed away from the table, knocked his chair over. His right hand unbuttoned his suit coat.
Marburg said, “I would indeed.”
Albion, his face bloated with rage, turned on Westfield. “There’s no such video. It does not exist.”
Harper opened the cover of the iPad, brought the screen to life. “Well, why don’t we all have a look,” she said. “You apparently don’t remember, Mr. Albion, but you took off the ghost mask you were wearing. Your face was visible for several seconds.”
“That’s preposterous. These are lies, disgusting fabrications.”
“Then let’s look at the video.”
“You’re all lying.” Albion’s flush was as purple as a new bruise.
At the far end of the table, Marburg watched with stern fascination. Albion seemed adrift. Publicly humiliated by his childhood hero, his good name vilified before a crucial business rival. His darkest secret laid bare.
“After you shot Ross twice,” she said. “You were about to fire a third time, but Spider stopped you. Do you remember that?”
Albion’s mouth opened, then shut. He swiped a hand through his stringy hair. His eyes were loose and uncertain.
“When Spider stopped you from shooting, that’s when you removed the mask. If you don’t recall doing that, it’s because you weren’t thinking straight. You must have been so exhilarated by what you’d done.”
“None of this happened,” Albion said. “The mask, all that. It’s a damnable lie.”
“Let’s watch the video, then. See for ourselves.”
Albion cast a helpless look at the faces around the table. No one would meet his gaze. He turned his head away from them and looked longingly back at the chocolate fountain. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “An outrage.”
There was a quaver of uncertainty in Albion’s voice. He hadn’t removed the mask at all, but would he remember that? He seemed unsure, so Harper pressed her bluff.
“Killed two people, then you took off the mask like it was too hot, too cramped. A bit small for your face.”
She caught the fleeting moment in his eyes. That instant of authenticity Deena had trained her to see. Albion’s blue-white rage was the tantrum of a child forever trapped in a stunted man’s physique, a boy with dreams too grand and silly for the world he occupied. Nothing he could do, not even murder, could satisfy his hunger, attain the impossible grandeur he’d witnessed on the movie screen and cultivated in his outlandish imagination.
“Never, never, never. I wouldn’t do such a thing. That would be idiotic. Am I crazy? Am I a fool? I built all this. Everything you see around you, I built it. Would I endanger all this?”
“You murdered my husband because he discovered the massacre you masterminded. Those villagers were preyed upon for years, their children kidnapped and taken away to work on your plantation to cut your labor costs, and those villagers had endured all they could handle and were fighting back and trying to expose you. So you ordered them slaughtered. Dozens and dozens of innocents.
“You came for my husband because his investigative work threatened to reveal all that. And after you shot him and my son, you took off the ghost mask and showed your face.”
“I didn’t. I’m not insane. None of this is true. None of it.”
The room was silent for several moments, then the door swung open, and Bonnie came bouncing into the room.
“Helmut ran off,” said Bonnie. “He was listening at the door. That’s called eavesdropping. I was eavesdropping too.”
“Go back to the waiting room, child.”
“You were talking about that ghost mask. I heard you.”
Albion gave her a stricken look. “Hush, Bonnie. Go back outside. Bixel, take her away. Do it now.”
Bixel rose and went for the girl, but Bonnie ducked away from her grasp.
“That was my favorite mask, Daddy. Casper the Friendly Ghost. You borrowed it to take on that trip and you promised to bring it back but you never did.”
The room was painfully silent. Albion’s mouth quivered.
“Mr. Albion,” Lavonne said, coming to her feet. “Put your hands above your head and keep them there.”
Albion recoiled, eyes drained of light. He looked around the room, as if searching for an exit, and when he saw none, he took a long swallow of air, and his right hand flashed inside his coat and came out with a sleek automatic.
“Don’t be an idiot, Lester,” Naff said, rising.
“You underestimate me,” Albion said. “Everyone does. They take one look at me, see a small man, and think I’m weak. But I’m not weak. I’m a powerful man. Powerful.”
Harper said, “Look at the video. Tell me how powerful you look while you’re murdering a baby in diapers.”
She held out the iPad.
Albion aimed his pistol and fired a single shot, blowing the iPad out of Harper’s hands. As the reverberations of the blast died away, the room was silent. Immobilized, Albion seemed stunned by his own rash act.
Then gradually he came to, his eyes hardened, and, as if taking a count, he ticked the pistol over each person around the table.
When he reached Bixel, standing beside him, Harper made her move. She rounded the end of the table, pushing past Westfield, and in the moments that followed, took in only disjointed fragments. A frenzy of shouts and the excruciating thunderclaps of Albion’s pistol firing, and firing again, and then again and again.
Naff hit, Westfield hit and hit again, Ben staggering to the side, falling away. Lavonne shot and, with a small gasp, falling hard. As Harper rounded the table, Albion pointed her way and put one slug in her leg as she flung herself on him, hammered his wrist, a solid blow, but somehow he held to the pistol, got off another shot that tugged hard at the same leg and instantly deadened her hip and thigh, and another round that fired a spike of stunning cold through her right arm, and, with half of her numb, she shouldered into him, fortified by her sweet Leo, her fine, noble husband, powered by the pressure that had been building for these last terrible weeks, feeling no pain, no weakness as she rammed him backward, pressed flat against him, her chin locked over his shoulder, levered his shooting hand up into the air with her one good arm, and drove him back and back into the chocolate fountain, crashing into it, the metal tiers screeching, breaking apart, then clattering to the floor, and Albion collapsed on top of the wreckage and struggled in her grip, sprawled on his back in the warm brown chocolate, the fountain’s auger continuing to turn, stirring the remains of the chocolate, stirring and stirring.
He clawed at her face as she jammed his head back into the warm pudding, held him there, faceup, drowning him in the brown African sauce, his body going limp, his disembodied eyes swimming just below the surface. From the corner of the room little Bonnie screamed in terror and delight as though rooting her father on, screaming with the wild abandon of a child on the steep swoop of a carnival ride.
Down and down and down, plunging . . . Harper watched bubbles flood from Albion’s mouth. She drew a long breath and caught herself. She jerked his head up from the pool of chocolate, released him. Albion limp and gasping. So
meone drew Harper away and laid her on the cold wood floor, where she writhed in sorrow and release.
Chocolate in her mouth. Chocolate in her eyes. Dark, rich chocolate.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Mid-May, Puerto Viejo, Algorta, Spain
One of Nick’s pals, Salvador Aregoa, a young, flamboyant Basque financier, owned a half dozen homes around the globe. One of them, a private rock-walled villa in the small fishing village of Algorta, was perched on a cliffside overlooking the busy harbor of Bilbao, Spain. It was there, after being released from the UniversitätsSpital, one of the better hospitals in Zurich, that Harper recuperated from her wounds.
For the moment, she had no desire to return to the United States. Too many ghosts were wandering the city of her birth. In fact, as the days passed, she’d been growing increasingly uncertain if she’d ever return.
The family life she’d so long imagined and hungered for had been a fleeting daydream, a glorious two years. All of it demolished in one brutal night, and Harper forced into exile, sent back to wandering the globe as Deena had done, rootless, on some endless indefinable quest with her new family assembled on the fly. Her oddball band, a father she was still struggling to accept, a grandfather who had proved himself more useful and more kind than she could ever have expected, and a Russian orphan boy, who was closer to her than any blood kin could ever be. Not the family she’d wanted. Not the one she’d dreamed of and briefly enjoyed. But a family still, one whose bonds had been tested in the flames of risk and violence.
In the hectic jumble of these last weeks, Harper had let go of one family and embraced another. If neither act were as yet complete, it was clear enough the process was moving forward with an inevitable momentum. Her grief was resolving, her heart freshened by the challenges of these new loyalties, these new trials of love.
Nick came and went from Bilbao. His official leave of absence had ended, and he was back at work for the World Bank. Flying off to New Zealand one week, Shanghai the next, and recently spending a two-week stint in Turkmenistan. Sal returned to Miami Beach but sent her daily texts that invariably included real estate listings within a few blocks of his condo with versions of the same refrain: “You can’t live in rented rooms forever.”
By the third week in May, Harper put aside her crutches for good, her left leg healing nicely. But her right arm still throbbed when she lifted it shoulder-high. Tony, the British ex-pat who was handling her physical therapy, visited the villa three times a week and put Harper through a grueling three-hour regimen of stretching and weight lifting. Back in Zurich, in four separate operations, her shattered humerus had been pinned back together, but the surgeons warned her the arm would never be quite the same. After weeks of PT, Tony predicted that she might regain as much as 80 percent of her original range of motion, though he doubted her fastball would ever have quite the pop it once had.
“How about her punching strength?” Nick had asked.
“Your sister is a boxer?”
Harper said, “As long as I can hold a camera to my eye, I’m fine.”
On the villa’s patio on a rare sunny afternoon, in that perpetually rainy region, Harper and Nick went over their game plan. What they would and would not tell Detective Joe Alvarez when he arrived later in the day.
Alvarez had already interviewed her once in Zurich shortly after the shooting in Albion’s conference room. But she’d pretended to be muddled from the pain meds and managed to dodge most of his questions. Since then, he’d been sending her regular e-mails to update her on the progress of his investigation. Having viewed the spy-cam video of the shooting of Ross and Leo, Detective Alvarez was trying without success to locate a Casper the Ghost mask that might have been discarded in the immediate area of the murder scene. He and his men had gone door-to-door in her old neighborhood, and he’d enlisted Geneva Carlson’s help at the Miami News to run stories prominently featuring the mask. So far nothing. It didn’t seem a promising approach to Harper.
Immediately after the shootings, Lester Albion was taken into custody and held briefly in Lenzburg Prison, thirty kilometers west of Zurich. But after only seventy-two hours behind bars, Albion was released, his lawyers arguing that Albion was simply defending himself against a malicious attack on his character that had turned physical. The statements of those present at the shooting were so contradictory that the authorities found it difficult to know exactly what had taken place before the shooting began.
Larissa Bixel claimed that Harper McDaniel and Ben Westfield had set up the meeting to make spurious public accusations against Mr. Albion, perhaps in a nefarious attempt to derail his business dealings, and when Albion refuted each of their claims, Harper became enraged and charged at Mr. Albion, as did her cohorts, Mr. Ben Westfield and an African American woman who drew her own weapon. Lavonne was hit twice in the hip. After several hours of surgery, she was rolled into a recovery room, the last place she was seen. Subsequently, the Swiss Federal Police were unable to establish Lavonne’s true identity or the method of her entry into their country. Neither Harper nor Ben Westfield could help them with the mystery.
Young Bonnie Albion agreed with Bixel’s claims that her father was only defending his life against the bad men, and though Adrian Naff sided with Ben and Harper, the criminal judge in the case was inclined to give Mr. Albion, a Swiss citizen and esteemed member of the community, the benefit of the doubt. The Swiss judicial system, Harper learned, was out of step with the rest of Europe, rarely sending violent offenders to jail. The prevailing view was that prison sentences were of limited value in lowering the risk of reoffending. So at that moment, Lester Albion was living in and working from his townhouse in Zurich’s Seefeld district along the lakeside under a lax form of house arrest.
After Albion’s release, Larissa Bixel provided to the Swiss Federal Police and Interpol a trove of e-mails and text messages sent to her by Helmut Mullen, incriminating him in the slaughter of dozens of African villagers as well as the shooting of an American, Jackson Sharp, in Miami, Florida. And though it wasn’t referred to in the e-mails, Bixel said that Mullen was also responsible for the strangulation death of Harry Combs, aka Spider. She claimed she’d been suppressing this information until after the Marburg deal was complete for fear of causing a scandal that might result in Mr. Marburg withdrawing from the transaction.
Guilty of withholding criminal information, yes, but Ms. Bixel had an understandable fiduciary defense for her actions, according to the same judge who released Albion. No criminal indictment for Bixel. But a full-scale, international manhunt for Helmut Mullen.
It was late afternoon, siesta time ending in the village below, and Harper was standing at the stone balustrade, looking down on the maze of steep cobblestone streets of Algorta and the small plaza where Café Usategui, the local bar, had moved all the tables from its musty interior into the sunny courtyard. The streets swarmed with locals in their black shawls and berets, everyone in a festive mood, as always seemed the case when the sun made a brief appearance in the Basque country.
“Westfield’s coming for a visit,” Nick said.
“Is he?”
“Arrives tomorrow. I said he could stay here if he wanted. I hope that’s okay.”
“It’ll have to be okay now that he’s invited.”
“Why so hostile? You don’t want to see him? He said you’ve not answered any of his e-mails, so he’s worried.”
“He needn’t be.”
“And he’s feeling very guilty about dropping the news on you back at the Widder. It must’ve been a shock.”
“One of many shocks,” she said.
“Harper, talk to me. What’s going on with you? You’re so withdrawn, you’re off somewhere like I’ve never seen you.”
She watched a black dog running along the small beach below. A full-out gallop, long ears flopping. No human calling it and not chasing seagulls. Just a dog reveling in the sunshine and the empty beach. The mutt reached one end of the sandy strip, turned, and gallo
ped back to the other. Harper felt a pang of jealousy for the dog, its freedom to play, to simply let loose.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
She’d been storing up the words for weeks. Unable to utter them aloud until she was absolutely certain they were true.
“I’m not letting go of this. I can’t. I won’t.”
The black dog stopped at the far end of the beach, panting. He looked out at the harbor, then flopped on his side and rolled onto his back, paws to the sky, rolling right and left.
“What’re you saying? You’re going after Albion again?”
“Him, yes, and Mullen, Bixel, Naff, all of them.”
“Why?”
“How can you ask that?”
“You’re still seething. Of course. So am I. Sal and Ben too. It’s terrible. It’s unfair. But Harper, it’s done. It’s over. We’re talking about the Swiss courts, here. Without new evidence, there’s nothing you can do. Nothing anybody can do.”
“Isn’t there?”
“Oh yes, sure. Become an assassin? Knock them off one by one? That’s not you, Harper. You know that’s not you.”
“Isn’t it? Are you so sure of that? Because I’m not.”
“So that’s why you’re pushing Ben away. You’re afraid he’ll bring you to your senses.”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
“This is my issue. It’s nobody else’s problem. I can’t put you or Ben or Sal in danger again. I won’t do that, let you risk your lives for this craziness.”
“So you push us away? That’s your solution?”
“Leave it alone, Nick. Let me handle it.”
He shook his head, either in refusal or frustration, she couldn’t say.
Alvarez arrived at four, sweating heavily from the walk up the grueling stairways that led from the Algorta train station. He carried an overnight bag and his brown sport coat, rumpled from his flight and the journey from the airport. His shirt and pants were disheveled too, and his face looked twice as worn as when she’d last seen him.
When They Come for You Page 23
