Kat stays silent.
“We haven’t found the killer and have no clues as to who he or she might be. There’s also the complication of her false identity. In the United States, she was Suzanne Anne Polinski. In Britain, she was Charlotte Elizabeth Thomas.”
He brushes down the sheet over the body, makes sure it’s hanging right.
“When was she killed?”
“Friday evening around 9:30. We’re still talking to—”
“9:30 British time?”
“That’s right.”
Kat performs a mental calculation. “Then she knew she was in danger.”
Grachev’s brow creases. “I’m sorry?”
“I got a voice mail and e-mail from her the next morning.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She would have recorded the messages and set them to send then. Maybe in case she wasn’t around to do it herself.”
He cups his hand around his chin. “What did she say?”
“Like your boss said, it was about the Coalition for Peace and Security. But only a line of the message made it. The rest got cut off.”
She studies Grachev, working out how much to tell. Grachev says nothing. He takes his hand from his chin and rests it on the edge of the gurney.
“Where was she killed?” asks Kat.
“She was attending a classical music concert in a village called Snape about a hundred miles northeast of London.”
“She was shot in the middle of a concert?”
“During the intermission, she walked from the concert hall along a path that leads down to a river. She was shot there.”
“Who was she with?”
“As far as we know, she was alone.”
“Why was she there?”
“We don’t know, Miss Polinski. There are still many things we are trying to ascertain.”
“Yeah, well, Suzy didn’t even like classical music.”
Grachev eyes Kat sharply. “She didn’t?”
“The only music I ever knew Suzy to have was an iPod playlist an old boyfriend put together for her for the car.”
“Thank you again.” Grachev’s an expressive man. Every thought seems to show—in his eyes, his brow, a movement of his hands.
His gaze shifts to the corner near the door, where he’s left a briefcase. “Mr. Sayer tells me he and his wife are long-standing family friends.”
“His wife—Nancy—she’s my godmother.”
“That’s good, at a time like this.”
He draws the sheet over Suzy’s face, and Kat doesn’t stop him. Grachev walks around the gurney, picks up the briefcase, opens it, and pulls out a padded envelope. “These are some of her things.”
Kat takes the envelope, opens it, and looks inside. There are keys, credit cards, photographs, the things any woman carries in a purse.
“Is her ring in here?” She picks up Suzy’s left hand from underneath the sheet. “She wore a big ring on this finger. Finger’s broken, ring’s missing.”
“Describe it,” says Grachev, bringing a notepad out of his jacket pocket.
“It’s big. You wouldn’t mistake it,” says Kat, determined to be as detailed and accurate as she can. “There’s the ring, which is silver, and on top of that is a square, made out of pressed tin. Four tiny diamonds, one on each corner, with lines—they look twisted, like a rope—linking them to a sapphire in the middle; a figure eight, meaning infinity.”
“She doesn’t look the sort of person to wear—how do you say—ostentatious things,” says Grachev. “Her clothes—we’re still examining them—they are stylish, but discreet.”
“It’s a family heirloom,” presses Kat. “From Poland. Our granddad gave it to Grandma, who gave it to my mom, who gave it to Suzy. The lid lifted up and underneath it, Suzy kept a picture of the family. Mom, Dad, Suzy, me, and our grandma. That’s why she wore it.”
“Thank you,” says Grachev, writing, then putting his notebook away. He points to the envelope. “But it’s not there. I’m sorry.”
“But who would want to take a ring?” she says, using the question to stop her eyes from filling up. She moves her hands to her hips and puts an expression of determination on her face. “You don’t kill someone like that for a lousy family heirloom.”
Grachev clasps his hands in front of him. “If you know of anyone who didn’t like your sister, any enemies or—”
“I don’t,” Kat cuts him off.
Grachev gives her a measured smile. “I understand,” he says. “Mr. Sayer said you planned to stay at your sister’s apartment tonight.”
“That’s right.”
He takes a sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket. “Your sister was due to go to this event tomorrow evening,” he says, unfolding it and holding it out to her.
It’s from the classified-ad section of a magazine. Kat takes one corner, Grachev holds the other. A section is circled. “I’d like to call you about it later,” he says, giving her his card. “And this is my number. Any time, twenty-four hours, if you think of anything.”
EIGHT
Sunday, 12:32 a.m., BST
They are at the dinner table, just the three of them, in a big room that is both the living and dining room. Kat recognizes furniture and pictures from the Sayers’ Georgetown house.
They’ve kept their Georgetown house on R Street because Nancy likes going back every couple of months. She’s not taken by London. The checkpoints are getting worse, and the weather’s been unusually hot. The windows are open, but there’s no breeze.
“The English and air-conditioning are like the English and showers,” says Sayer, wiping sweat off his forehead with his wrist. “They just don’t get what they’re all about.”
On the wall hang photographs of Nate Sayer, on the edges of meetings with important people around the world. John Polinski is in a lot of them; group snapshots at the end of visits with cocoa growers in Africa; in tribal shirts on a Pacific island; bundled up against a below-zero winter in Moscow, when he and Sayer went over to look at working conditions in Soviet factories; another in Russia, hunting out in the wilds, one of their hosts holding up a brace of duck for the camera; and a picture Kat has known ever since she can remember, taken at the fairground in Lancaster, Ohio—one of her dad’s arms is around Sayer’s shoulders, and he’s holding Kat’s hand. Kat is barely five years old. It was taken the day he opened the orphanage he’d set up in Lancaster for the kids of migrant workers who’d died or become disabled in factories, quarries, or meatpacking plants. Kat made a lot of friends there.
Sayer used to be her father’s chief investigator. Early on in their partnership, Kat’s father represented the family of an undocumented Brazilian worker who cut himself during a night shift at a midwestern meatpacking plant and died from blood loss. By posing as a drifter, Sayer infiltrated the plant and came out with pictures of the floors, dark red with cattle blood, of workers unprotected from spiked meat hooks and knives, and stories of illegal workers being injured and killed. They made a good team; Sayer’s roughness and arrogance was a foil to John Polinski’s idealism.
But neither Kat nor Suzy ever trusted him. Sayer is a man with a chip on his shoulder. While his father was a decorated Vietnam War general, Sayer barely graduated from West Point and only made captain before leaving the army. Nancy was Kat’s mom’s best friend, and Suzy always said their dad took Sayer on as a favor to Nancy.
When Kat’s parents were buried, side by side, almost four years ago to the week, at the cemetery of the United Methodist Church in Great Falls, Virginia, Nate and Nancy sat at the front of the church, acting as family and guardians to Kat and Suzy. They held the show together, Nancy staying with Suzy and Kat. Sayer moved between colleagues, business people, politicians, and family, the other relatives ashen with shock, their eyes glassy, unable to take in what had happened.
Kat pushes her chair back, both hands on her plate, the light salad barely touched.
“Thanks, Aunt Nance,” she says
. “It was great, but you know . . .”
“I’ve made a bed up in the guest bedroom for you,” Nancy says. “I’ll clear the dishes. You and Nate, you have some stuff to go over.”
Nancy goes to the kitchen and closes the door. Kat walks to the window.
“Where are we?” she says, her back to Sayer. “Like, is this central London? Uptown? Downtown?”
“As central as it gets,” says Sayer.
Suzy’s murder lingers between them, unspoken. He has an envelope on the table and is drawing papers from it. “The U.S. embassy’s three blocks away. That big road a block from here is Park Lane, and on the other side of that is Hyde Park, which is their equivalent of Central Park. But I prefer it. The English do parks well. The business district, that’s about three miles farther east. Theater district is close by, a ten-minute walk.”
“So Suzy’s place, is it not in the center then?” Kat puts her head outside the window to catch a bit of breeze. She’s three floors up. The street below is narrow and pretty empty, not surprising, since it’s past midnight.
“Suzy was a little way out,” says Sayer, changing Kat’s tenses. “This is Zone One. She was in Zone Two. Not far.”
“These zones, they’re like in Washington?”
“They’re based on the transportation zones, but a few years back, after London had bombings, they also became security zones. If they think there’s likely to be an attack, they set up checkpoints on the zone boundaries. Britain’s not as secure as back home. It’s more in the middle of things, so to speak.”
“Does that have anything to do with Suzy’s murder?” says Kat, coming in from the window and moving over to the table.
Sayer shrugs. “The police believe it may be linked in some way. The signing of the Coalition for Peace and Security is coming up. They call it Project Peace over here. It’s divisive. A lot of people don’t want it.”
It’s the same line she’d heard from Cranley. “And Suzy never got in touch with you?”
“Both of you pretty much dropped out of our lives.”
“I guess that’s true,” says Kat.
“We had a Charlotte Thomas registered with the embassy, but I had no idea it was Suzy. She was working for an international law firm, and from what I can make out, her job was to make sure multinational firms met their global obligations under CPS guidelines, the sort of work your dad and I did.”
On the table, Sayer separates the documents into three piles, leaves the pen beside them, and steps back. “I know you don’t want to, Kat, but you’ve got to sign these.”
Kat folds her fingers behind her head, stretches her back. “My brain’s kind of blown right now,” she says. “Can’t it wait till morning?”
“Best to get it done.”
“This whole thing,” she says edgily. “It’s not about documents, you know. It’s about finding who killed Suzy.”
He must have caught the anger in her eyes, but went the wrong way about calming it. “Suzy would want you to.”
Kat becomes rigid, checks herself, and says nothing.
“This one here says you’ve identified the body.” Sayer walks around the table toward Kat and lays a form in front of her. It has the State Department seal on the top. “This one is the same, but for the British. I said I’d get you to sign it for Detective Inspector Grachev.” Kat watches as Sayer places it neatly on top of the first one.
“And this is to release the body for transfer back to the United States. I can get these processed tomorrow. Nancy and I will come back with you and Suzy’s body on Monday.”
Kat stares at the forms. She doesn’t reply. She leans on the table, splaying her fingers. “Suzy’s okay where she is,” she says at last. “As cold rooms go, it looks fine.”
Sayer shakes his head. “It’s not that simple.”
“Not that simple that you can send the body of a murder victim back before the investigation’s even begun?”
Sayer shifts his feet, rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, then gathers up the papers. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should do this in the morning.”
Kat picks up her bag off a chair by the door and walks out of the living room into the hallway. Sayer reaches for her elbow. “Kat, you can’t go back to Suzy’s tonight.”
“I’m going,” says Kat, knocking his hand away.
“Best you stay with us,” insists Sayer.
The door to the kitchen opens. Nancy appears, drying her hands on a dishcloth.
“If she wants to go, let her.” Nancy hands the cloth to Sayer and fumbles under her apron for something in her pocket. “I’ll see you downstairs and put you in a cab.”
The old elevator, with its polished metal gate and arrival bell, takes forever to come up. As they wait, Nancy says, “If they ask you at a checkpoint, show your passport and entry stamp.” She presses money into Kat’s hand.
Nancy turns to leave as the elevator arrives, but Kat holds the door.
“Wait,” Kat says. “Aunt Nance, can we go for a walk somewhere?”
NINE
Sunday, 1:10 a.m., BST
Streetlights show the dampness on the trees. Low mist is settling in the garden square across the street, and even past one in the morning, the English summer air is humid. They are in a street that slopes down to a side road of yellow and white painted houses behind clean black metal fences, with garbage bags dumped on the sidewalk, bicycles chained to lampposts, and expensive cars at meters.
Nancy leads because she knows Kat wants to talk. They walk silently for a few minutes, then onto a cobbled street with ethnic restaurants, tables outside, sounds of laughter, even after one in the morning. The night heat creates a bead of sweat on Kat’s upper lip. The walk calms her.
“There was a time you called me when I didn’t call you back,” says Kat. “It was the day I saw Suzy off at Dulles. The cab dropped me back at Olive Street. You’d left a message on my answering machine, but I couldn’t face talking to anyone. I didn’t call. Instead, I locked the apartment and kept walking, walking, and walking until I got to a place called Dix Street. Same city, but worlds away from Georgetown.”
They wait for the light to change, then cross the road to a square, where sparkling lamps decorate the trees in a small garden in front of them.
“You want to know what Dix Street is like? Imagine the filthiest, most run-down neighborhood, a place breeding crime, breeding drugs, breeding despair—and I mean breeding, because no one can ever get rid of it. You can’t kill it, you can only let it multiply, and try and control it. But that’s never going to work, because the place reflects the souls of the people who live there. They like it. They get wired up by it because it’s their mirror. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself, Aunt Nance, but I’ve never told this to someone who knows me as well as you.
“I was Kat Polinski, a spoiled little rich kid with a private education and a nice wardrobe, smart as hell, raised next door to you in a neighborhood wealthy like where we are now, and I rented a room in a house on Dix Street because I thought it helped me know how I really felt after Mom and Dad’s death.”
Kat runs her fingers backward along the garden railings and lets them hurt her knuckles. “The reason I’m telling you is because I was living with a black guy there, a small-time gangster who called himself Mercedes Vendetta.”
She stops to take Nancy’s hands, and when she looks into her face, she sees something from way back in her childhood that makes her feel good.
“You know, to this day, when I’m backed into a corner, I find myself talking like Mercedes, grinding my sentences, like they do on Dix Street. It’s self-protection, I guess.”
“I understand,” says Nancy. Beneath her makeup and nip and tuck, Nancy’s age shows, and there’s strain, too, from her long, childless marriage to Nate, and Kat wonders if Nancy knows about Nate as Kat does.
“Mercedes always said that when other people have the power, you have to run with it. He said, ‘Don’t stop. You just go with it til
l you got the momentum to escape.’”
Nancy says nothing, but her expression tells Kat she wants her to continue.
“I feel now, Aunt Nance, with Suzy, that everyone else has the power. But I’m not stopping, and I’m not walking away. I can’t just go back with you and Nate and bury her.”
Kat falls quiet and resumes the walk.
“I was the only white person around the Dix Street area. But they got to know me, some of them even liked me, though they didn’t know what I was, and curiosity’s not a popular habit in a place like that.
“I made a good living as a criminal. I ran a whole operation from Dix Street. Wrote software. Set up proxy IP addresses all over the world—Toronto, Jakarta, the Isle of Man. Dozens of them. I sold firewalls, then broke through them. Set up my own satellite antenna. I was good, Nance. I made a lot of money, which I didn’t need, because I had Dad’s trust fund.
“Some days I’d catch a cab back to Olive Street, call Suzy, tell her about my law school classes, have Starbucks cappuccino, then head back to Dix Street. I didn’t feel bad about my double life. I mean, Suzy was living as Charlotte Thomas. If she could do it, why couldn’t I?”
They shift to single file to make way for two men in tuxedos talking loudly and smoking cigars, Kat inhaling the smoke as they pass, enjoy- ing it.
“One afternoon Mercedes and I were in bed,” she says. “The closet door was open with a big full-length mirror on it. I had my head turned to one side, watching us in the mirror.”
She hesitates and consciously folds her arms. “Is this okay, you know, I’ve never talked about these things with you before?”
Nancy replies with a tight laugh. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine with racy stories.”
“Mercedes and I, we both had good, firm bodies; me white, him black, him tall, me five-foot-four; me on top; his hands on my waist, making me feel real good. Mercedes is good in bed; nothing wrong with him in that department. Only up here,” Kat taps her head, “he’s a little unhinged in the mind, and I was thinking that our reflection in the mirror was more real than us actually having sex on the bed. You know why? Because I was so angry. I was filled with it. Anger and self-loathing, like I wanted to set fire to myself and burn it all away, because deep down, I didn’t like what I was doing with my Mercedes and my life, even though I was enjoying the moment.
The History Book Page 4
