The Rich and the Dead

by Liv Spector

  Her phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen and pressed Ignore. Dylan. She wasn’t sure how to talk to him knowing what she knew. How could she not warn this amazing man about the awful future that awaited him? So, for the time being, she decided it would be better for both of them if she stayed silent.

  Her mind kept switching between thoughts of Dylan and thoughts of her mom. The memories, both joyous and sad, crashed over her like waves, ready to drag her under and swallow her whole. Seeing her mother again had been as excruciating as it was comforting. But that just about summed everything up these days—a mix of pain and pleasure. Lila felt that, no matter what she did, it was somehow wrong.

  “Wherever you go, there you are,” Lila said out loud as tears popped quickly into her eyes. It was a saying that her mother often repeated, always with a knowing smile. And, as usual, her mother was right. Lila had traveled farther than anyone had thought possible, she’d traveled back in time, and yet here she was, still blind to the same things, struggling in the same ways, failing to solve the same case. Even though she’d created a whole new persona for herself, she had never felt the burden of her own failings more than right at this moment.

  As she drove, she realized that she needed to get away from Camilla Dayton’s life and distractions in order to clear her mind. She needed to be away from Effie. She needed to take a break from maintaining this exhausting facade.

  WHAT DO YOU mean you’re leaving for the weekend? Where are you going?” Effie asked. It was Saturday morning, and Lila was putting several bags into the trunk of her car as Effie watched with a stunned look on her face. “I thought we’d go to Fisher Island today. I made plans for us.” There was a whiny desperation in her voice, mixed with more than a hint of annoyance.

  “Some of my old friends from the city are in Key West for the weekend. They invited me down at the last minute,” Lila lied easily to Effie’s pouting face. “I’d invite you, but they said the place is small and kind of shabby.”

  “Oh, and here I was worried that you didn’t have any friends. I’ve gone all-out introducing you to mine—to every damn person in this city. But clearly it would be too much to ask for you to let me meet anyone you know.” Effie paused, looking at Lila with her eyes squinted and her lips pursed.

  Lila knew Effie was trying to bully her out of going, but she needed the space. Not to mention that it was hard to really feel pushed around by a hundred-pound blonde wearing a rhinestone bikini.

  “It sounds like you don’t really need my help anymore.” Effie sniffed.

  “You know, I think you’re right, Effie,” Lila said as she slammed down the trunk lid and got in the driver’s seat. She was tired, but more than anything, she was fed up with being polite when she didn’t need to be. She was here for a reason, to solve a case, and nothing in the world mattered more than that. Every moment she wasted on Effie’s feelings, she was standing in her own way. In less than one month the Star Island killer would strike. If she didn’t uncover the killer’s identity, then this whole ordeal would be for nothing. “I’m not as helpless as you think, Effie. Never have been.”

  “Really, I beg to differ. You’d have nothing if it weren’t for me. Nothing. But anytime I ask you for anything, you’re busy.”

  “You know that’s not true, Effie. I feel like all I do is repay you for generosity I’ve never asked for. It’s like you give me things just to keep me on a goddamned leash.”

  With that, Lila shut the car door and drove away, not even looking in the rearview mirror to see Effie’s angry face. As she was heading south, Lila was surprised to find herself still dwelling on their fight. She was genuinely hurt by what Effie had said. She shook her head. She needed to stop thinking of Effie as a friend, and remember that she was just a means to an end.

  That part about visiting New York friends was a lie, of course, but the Key West bit was true. Key West, that perfect slice of weirdness, was just the escape hatch Lila needed to hide away, take stock of the case, and grab some perspective back from this long, tumbling fall down the rabbit hole she’d been on for the last couple of months. She’d booked herself a few nights in a cozy cottage, painted robin’s-egg blue, on a sleepy street in Old Town. Now she raced toward it in her Maserati as if her life depended upon it.

  Just as he’d said he would in their e-mail exchange, the owner of the cottage left the key under the large rock beneath the honeysuckle bush to the left of the white picket fence. As she brought her bags into the cottage’s foyer, Lila exhaled with relief. It was relaxed and ramshackle, a little musty and a lot beachy. Unlike in the Star Island home she’d recently made her own, none of the furniture was worthy of being featured in Architectural Digest and none of the art hanging on the walls was “important.” It was perfect.

  The cottage was two stories, with a spartan kitchen and a tiny backyard canopied by magnificent palm trees. Lila picked the largest of the three bedrooms, on the second floor, to set up her office. She could sleep anywhere, but what she needed was space to think. In the large bedroom, she carefully removed the few pictures from the wall and moved the spare furniture to the center of the room.

  Most of her information was on her computer or on Teddy’s thumb drive, but she felt that the evidence, in its digitized form, was keeping its secrets hidden from her. On the long drive south to Key West, she’d stopped at a big box store to purchase a printer, which she set up now on the dining room table. Late into the night, she printed up hundreds of pages of documents and pictures while slowly sipping bourbon, with the windows thrown wide open so that she could feel and smell the humid ocean breeze.

  When most of the printing was done, Lila moved to the bedroom on the second floor, making several trips up and down the stairs, hauling stacks of printed pages, photographs, and pages torn from her notebooks. On each of the four walls, she created a makeshift bulletin board, with every victim getting a third of one wall.

  On the north wall, she put Effie Webster, Meredith Sloan, Vivienne Hunter.

  On the east wall: Javier Martinez, Theo von Fick, Fernando Salazar.

  On the west wall: Neville Crawley, Sam Logan, and Rusty Browder.

  On the south wall: Chase Haverford, Adebayo “Johnny” Oluwa, and Khaled Fathallah.

  Then she stood in the center of the room, regarding it all. The members of the Janus Society, with their messy lives—their pasts, their presents, and their futures—were all there, in fragments taped up on the wall. These twelve people had been her constant companions for more than three years, so much so that each face and each story felt as familiar to her as her own. Yet there was a riddle at the core of all of it that she couldn’t solve. Why would someone murder this group of philanthropists, these people who gave so much to those in need? And who could the murderer be?

  Lila was so absorbed in her thoughts that she startled when her cell phone rang. It was Effie calling. Lila didn’t want to answer the phone at all, but she knew ignoring Effie would just make everything between them all the worse.

  The moment she forced herself to pick up the phone, an assault of deafening sound greeted her. “Camilla? Camilla?!” Effie shouted over the loud hum of voices and throbbing club music in the background. Lila figured she was at one of her usual haunts, letting men buy her round after round of custom-made cocktails.

  “You won’t believe what I just heard,” Effie squealed. She sounded high.

  “Tell me.”

  “You made that offer on the house forever ago, right? And even though Meredith calls you, like, ten times a day, nothing’s happened, right? Now I know why. It’s Alexei Dortzovich’s fault. He just closed on the house this morning! Can you believe it?”

  In truth, Lila had known she’d never get the place. She’d put in low offers and followed up with even lower counteroffers. She’d requested various inspections and made inquiries about a million little ridiculous things just to keep dragging the process out. Lila was stalling and Meredith knew it.

  That someone else bought the
house was no surprise, but the fact that Alexei had swooped in and purchased it was perplexing. After the Star Island massacre, Lila had interviewed every person who was on that island on the day of the murder, and she’d investigated every single person who owned a home there—but Alexei was never interviewed.

  “Hmmm . . . that’s curious,” Lila said.

  “Why aren’t you freaking out? I mean, that’s your house! And what does that hideous Russian need with yet another mansion? It makes me sick. And not to sound too paranoid, but,” Effie said, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, making it difficult to hear her over the pounding techno playing in the background, “I think Alexei is, like, obsessed with me. You’ve seen how he hits on me. And he’s always totally staring at me. Now he’s going to be living right next to me all the time? I’m seriously worried he’s stalking me, Camilla.”

  As Effie continued to share alcohol-fueled speculations, Lila paced back and forth in the room, looking at the walls.

  “I mean,” Effie said, “the Russians are just so tacky. I’m not being racist or anything.”

  “I don’t think Russians are a race, Ef.”

  “Whatever. You know what I mean. It’s like the more garish the better with those guys. Am I right?”

  This coming from a woman whose closet boasted enough sequins to turn Liberace’s head.

  “I don’t know,” Lila said carefully.

  Effie chattered on as Lila surveyed the visual map of the case she had created. She had surreptitiously taken hundreds of pictures of the future murder victims at the Fisher Island Club, where all the Janus Society were members. As she looked at the photos she suddenly saw a pattern, something she’d never noticed before.

  Alexei.

  Now the words were spilling out of Effie’s mouth at an ever-quickening pace. “And so I’m going to, like, build a moat or something, and fill it with alligators, and—”

  “Effie. Stop. I gotta go. We’ll figure out what to do about Alexei when I’m back, okay?”

  “No, it’s not okay. This guy is going to totally murder me, and you’re just going to—”

  “Bye, Ef.” Lila hung up the phone. She hated to do it, but she knew Effie. In a state like this, she would go on talking all night, and she most likely wouldn’t remember anything in the morning. And Lila needed to focus.

  She ran down the stairs to the back porch, where she remembered seeing a few fishing poles. In a basket next to the poles, she found what she was looking for—spools of fishing line. She grabbed a fluorescent yellow spool and hurried back upstairs.

  With the fishing line in hand, she went to a picture of Effie at the club frowning at a clearly drunken Alexei, who had his arm draped over her bare shoulder. Lila taped the line to the wall under the picture. Then she dragged the line to a photo of Alexei and Chase standing side by side at the bar, locked in what appeared to be a serious conversation. Then a picture with Sam Logan. Then one with Oluwa. Then Vivienne. With each new connection, Lila’s heart pounded harder. After fifteen minutes of this activity, she stood back in the center of the room and marveled at what she saw. The yellow line wrapped around the room. She had a picture of every member of the Janus Society with Alexei. No one else could be linked to all twelve victims.

  But what could it all mean? No one in the world knew who was in the Janus Society until their massacre revealed the truth.

  Then she wondered, could Alexei have been part of the society? Why not? She hadn’t considered the possibility of a thirteenth member, but it made such sense she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. Maybe Alexei had snapped and killed all of his compatriots. After all, Effie, who wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything, was terrified of Alexei.

  Lila knew what she had to do. She had to pack all this evidence up, get in the car, and return to Star Island as fast as possible. She had a lead again, and nothing could stop her from chasing after it.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE MOMENT SHE got back to South Beach, Lila hurried to dig up every single bit of information about Alexei Romanovich Dortzovich.

  It turned out that he was born on October 7, 1975, in a small industrial city on the Black Sea in what was then the Soviet Union. He was born into poverty and orphaned at the age of five, when both his parents died in a car crash. Alexei was raised by his uncle, an uneducated auto mechanic. When he was eighteen, he joined the newly formed Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the penniless but highly trained military that rose out of the ashes of the Soviet Union. In the army, Alexei quickly rose through the ranks to serve in the Kremlin’s elite special forces unit. He was a highly trained marksman.

  After serving in the army for seven years, Alexei opened a small pig farm in Odessa. The pig business made him into a millionaire. Thanks to his riches and his strong connections to the Kremlin, Alexei then got into the booming oil business, which in a little less than a decade made him one of Russia’s new class of oligarchs. Alexei relocated full-time to Miami in 2012, following his rumored connection to a Russian mafia money-laundering scheme that had moved four billion euros through one of his mining companies.

  Lila rented a Ford Focus and tucked her blond hair up into a Miami Dolphins baseball cap, hoping to follow Alexei throughout the day and well into the night without being noticed. But that proved harder than she had anticipated. He had at least one bodyguard with him at all times, and his driver followed standard secret service protocol to avoid possible tails. Though she had years of experience keeping a mark in her sight, she had to really struggle not to lose Alexei’s black Range Rover as it wove through Miami’s streets.

  On Thursday afternoon, Lila followed the SUV down to Ocean Drive. The car pulled over at Eleventh Street, and Alexei jumped out of the backseat, heading straight for the boardwalk. His two bodyguards followed him. Lila drove past then and, as quickly as possible, parked her car illegally on the next side street. She hurried back to the boardwalk on foot as fast as she could without drawing attention to herself.

  The streets were clogged with the usual mix of tourists, drunken college kids, young bodies exhibited in barely-there bathing suits, and the eccentric derelicts and lunatics that make up the South Beach carnival of human beauty and grotesquerie. The glitter and doom of Miami were on full display.

  Lila knew that Alexei wouldn’t easily spot her in this mass of humanity, but she worried that he would, once again, elude her. It took her about twenty minutes of frantically searching the crowds before she caught sight of one of his bodyguards, an enormously tall and muscular man with dark black, pockmarked skin. Then Lila spotted Alexei. He was sitting on a park bench, flanked by his security, and talking to another man. Keeping her distance, she walked closer. She felt even more sure that her hunch about Alexei was right when she saw who he was sitting with—the one and only Chase Haverford.

  Even with the crowds concealing her as they pulsed and pushed their way around her, Lila couldn’t get close enough to the bench to overhear what Alexei and Chase were talking about. But she could see them well enough to know that they were arguing. Alexei’s face was contorted with rage, his hands gesticulating wildly. Chase sat with his aviator sunglasses on and his head mostly down, never looking directly at Alexei. He appeared jumpy and self-conscious, like a man praying not to be recognized. Then Alexei sprang off the bench, spinning toward Chase.

  Lila heard him shout, “You are not the one who refuses me, asshole! Fucking, cocksucking asshole!”

  At that, Chase stood up and, without even throwing a glance toward Alexei, walked away. The Russian stood there, stunned, his arms hanging heavy at his sides. Lila hustled back to Ocean Drive, where she passed by Alexei’s SUV. His driver was in the car, leaning out the window trying to grab the attention of any one of the bikini-clad girls strutting by on wobbly high-heeled shoes.

  FOR A FEW frenzied days in early December, Miami Beach turns its distracted attentions to the Art Basel festival, during which every artist, collector, gallerist, and artsy wannabe descends
upon the city to buy, sell, pontificate, posture, and drink headache-inducing cheap white wine, all while complaining vigorously about the degraded and debased state of the art world. The convention center becomes a roiling sea of people in ridiculous glasses, eye-rolling and air-kissing and arguing. No one loved it more than Javier Martinez, who always hosted a festival kickoff party at his gallery.

  “Darlings! Hello!” Javier exclaimed as Effie and Lila walked into the packed gallery. The cavernous main room had no light save for a few glass-encased voodoo candles weakly flickering on the floor. Turkish psychedelic music played so loudly that Lila could feel it reverberating through her body. “So glad you could make it,” Javier said as he gave them both perfectly executed air kisses.

  As Lila’s eyes adjusted to the dark, Javier finally came into clearer view. A dandy at the most casual of times, he was fully turned out tonight in a tight-fitting white suit with a robin’s-egg blue silk shirt underneath, unbuttoned to his sternum, and a silver handkerchief tied jauntily around his neck. He looked like a perfect cross between Tom Ford and Tony Montana.

  “Of course we’re here!” Effie squealed. “Yours is always the best party of this whole dreadful week.”

  “No party is a party without you, Effie, darling. Enjoy yourself! Be back in a second,” Javier called over his shoulder to them as he went on to air-kiss a tiny Japanese woman with a shock of red hair sitting stiffly upon her head.

  Effie grabbed Lila’s hand. “Let’s circulate.”

  Lila was still anxious to figure out Javier’s connection to Sandoval, but doing it at this moment was an impossibility. She could barely hear herself think, let alone pick Javier’s brain for clues.

  Scattered throughout the gallery were eerily realistic life-size wax statues of people that, like the candles, were slowly burning from the top down. The human candles gave the place a haunted feel as Lila navigated through the rooms in the semidarkness, not knowing which people were real and which would, upon closer inspection, reveal their lit wicks and collapsing skulls.