Death in Dark Blue

by Julia Buckley

  “A man? Is it his name, or a nickname or something?”

  She lifted an article from the file and held it up; it was a printout of a story from a magazine called Island Life. “Wait—I recognize that picture! I saw it more than once when I was doing my searches. I remember those three men!”

  “Yeah, this is potentially one of the nuggets of gold we’re mining for. The guy we care about is in the middle. His name is N. Leandros Lazos.”

  “Yes! I’ve seen him before. He’s some sort of shipping magnate?”

  “Sort of. He’s oozing money. The guy is so rich he spends money to hide how rich he is.”

  She held up the photo and pointed at him. “Can you guess what the N stands for?”

  “Nikon!” I slapped my forehead. “Belinda, why did that never dawn on me? Not once?”

  She made a stern face. “Because why would it? You were thinking, you told me, that Nikon was some sort of code or the name of a yacht. So why would you care what some guy’s initials stood for in some blurry photograph?”

  “Tell me about this man.”

  She held up a little sheaf of papers from the file. “Okay, I’ve got a bunch of background stuff. Normally librarians don’t head straight for Wikipedia, but there’s some information there that I couldn’t find anywhere else. It has to be substantiated, which I’ll try to do in the next few days. Then I have a couple of Businessweek articles about him, as well as some gossip column junk. Oh, and a very interesting article in National Geographic about a project he spearheaded to help clean up the waters of the Mediterranean.”

  “Okay. So he’s Greek?”

  “Born in Greece, but brought to the U.S. when he was twelve. He has dual citizenship. Daddy, Aristotle, was a rich man, too, but our Nikon makes Daddy’s money look like minimum wage.”

  “Lovely.” I stared at the photograph that I had seen before and dismissed. Three men stood talking on a dock before a sparkling-white yacht. They all had graying hair, but they looked fit and tanned—men of leisure and privilege who plied their muscles in pursuit of pleasure rather than work. According to the caption, N. Leandros Lazos was the one with his foot planted on some sort of luggage, his elbow leaned casually on one knee. He had a square, handsome face, rugged as an adventurer’s. He wore a white shirt with half of the buttons undone so that his firm chest was visible beneath, along with a sprinkling of salt and pepper hair. One of his companions had apparently said something funny, because Nikon was laughing, his head thrown back slightly, his white teeth gleaming. Above the three men was a sky of purest blue, with no cloud in sight.

  “What kind of name is Nikon, anyway?”

  Belinda lifted her pointer finger. “Hang on, I’ve got that.” She rustled through her red folder. “Nikon has both Greek and Russian etymology. It means victory. Leandros is a Greek surname, the masculine version of Leander. Remember Leander from mythology? He was Hero’s lover, who swam across the Hellespont each night to be with her. One night he drowned there, during a storm. Anyway, Leandros means ‘lion of a man.’ And Lazos, the family name, is a shortened from of the patronymic Lazarakis—a liberty old Aristotle took soon after he arrived in the United States.”

  “Huh. So what do we know about the Lazos clan?”

  “Well, the old man died three years ago in some expensive retirement home. Nikon is the oldest son in the family, and he’s basically in charge of the money, which he seems to have been spending liberally all over the world. As far as I can determine, it doesn’t matter how much he spends; it seems to accumulate rather than dwindle. Either he has the Midas touch, or he just has a boatload of money.”

  “Does he have a yacht? We’re looking for a yacht.”

  She grabbed my arm, her eyes wide. “He does! Or he did. He owned a yacht called Apollo, but apparently he sold that years ago. I found an article in Island Life about how he was looking for something new and better, but I haven’t yet found the name of the new ship.”

  “Okay. Okay. This is good. This is wonderful, Belinda. I have so much to bring back now to—Camilla.”

  She studied me with her large green eyes. “How do you feel about today’s headlines? It must be hard. He’s your friend, right?”

  “Yes. And Camilla has known him far longer. We are disgusted by the media coverage. Sam is just as upset as anyone about the poor woman’s death.”

  “Well, he would be, right?”

  “Of course. She was found on his property. I’m sure you read the story.”

  “No, but I mean—because of their special connection.”

  I paused. “You mean his wife’s connection to Taylor Brand?”

  “Yes. And his. It was Taylor Brand who introduced him to his wife, did you know that?”

  My stomach turned over in an unpleasant way. “No. How did that occur?”

  “Well, because he dated Taylor Brand in college. I guess they both went to Columbia in New York. Here.” She found a picture with a caption from a Columbia yearbook and pushed it over to me. In it was a very young Sam West with his arm slung around a younger, sweeter Taylor Brand, whose hair was short and sleek, and whose face was free of makeup. They looked to be about nineteen.

  When the picture was taken, Sam West hadn’t even met Victoria. His family had still been alive. He had been romantically linked to Taylor Brand.

  “He dated her,” I said blankly.

  “Yeah. So it’s got to be weird for him, having her turn up in his backyard. And funny that she never mentioned their previous relationship in her blog. I read entries going way back, and she never calls him anything but her friend’s husband.”

  “No. And he never mentioned it, either.” There was a strange ringing inside my head, as though someone had set off a giant firecracker, the noise of which had caused temporary deafness.

  I stood up. “May I borrow this file?”

  “Sure. I have copies. Meanwhile, I’ll keep digging.”

  I struggled to be polite; there was still an empty, cottony feeling around my brain, but I managed to say, “You’ve done amazing work, Belinda. Thank you so much.”

  “Thank you! This is the most exciting job I’ve had since I’ve come to this library. My most exciting job period. Bring me work anytime.” Her smile was enthusiastic and almost ingenuous.

  “Yes. I will. Thanks so much.” I waved, and somehow my feet led me to the exit, where I put on my coat and scarf.

  At long last we knew what Nikon might mean, and it offered a possible path to finding Victoria West.

  Despite the fact that I’d been longing for that very thing for two months, my mind could only process one fact as I walked home through the thickening snow: Sam West had been romantically involved with Taylor Brand; he had been given numerous opportunities to share that information, and, for whatever reason, he had remained silent.

  I told Camilla that I didn’t feel well and would fill her in later about the librarian’s findings. She nodded with a shrewd expression and suggested I might want to lie down. I took the gift of privacy she offered and went to my room. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. I didn’t have to look again at the picture of Sam with Taylor, because the image was seared into my memory, and I saw it when I closed my eyes. I opened them at one point to find that Rochester and Heathcliff, Camilla’s German shepherds, had nosed into my room and were standing at my bed, as if waiting to play.

  “How did you get in here?” I asked blearily, scratching their big ears. But I knew; I had been so eager to fling myself on my bed that I had barely closed the door.

  Eventually the dogs wandered back out, and I dragged myself to the bathroom to splash water on my face. I put on some makeup to liven up my pale skin, and tied a green scarf around my neck to add some color to my ensemble of a black sweater with blue jeans.

  Finally I grabbed the file Belinda had given me and made my way downstairs. Sam was alread
y there. I could hear his deep voice rumbling in conversation with Camilla, whose own polite and friendly tones were familiar to me.

  When I reached Camilla’s office I kept my eyes downcast, but I could feel Sam’s gaze upon me.

  “Are you feeling better, Lena?” Camilla asked.

  “A bit, thank you. I’m sorry to have disappeared that way.”

  I ventured a glance upward and saw that both of them looked a bit surprised—perhaps by my tone or by my appearance. I was trying to act as normal as possible, but I doubted I was succeeding.

  Camilla and Sam continued their conversation, but he occasionally darted worried glances in my direction. He looked surprisingly good, despite the change in his situation; he wore a navy blue shirt with a pair of khaki pants, and his often-messy hair had been combed neatly, curling slightly against his neck. I was torn between wanting to kiss that neck and wanting to wring it.

  Camilla stopped talking and said, “Lena, do tell us what is wrong. You’re glaring at Sam.”

  Sam looked surprised, whether by Camilla’s words or my expression I did not know.

  I stood up, still holding the article, and placed it on Camilla’s desk. She glanced down at it and said, “Oh. I see.”

  “I don’t,” said Sam, looking both confused and a bit impatient. “Would you care to fill me in, Lena?”

  “No,” I said wearily. “I don’t know what to say to you.”

  Sam’s eyes revealed that I had hurt him, as I intended, but it brought me no pleasure. Camilla handed the article across the desk. “Lena is distressed because you were once romantically linked to Taylor Brand, and you didn’t tell any of us that information. This is a problem, Sam. Doug will find it to be a problem.”

  Sam took the article, his face blank, and stared down at the picture. “What? This? I—this was years ago! I was nineteen years old. What does this have to do with anything?”

  My voice was pitched higher than I intended. “You don’t think reporters will read anything into the fact that you once dated this woman? This woman who showed up dead in your yard? And yet somehow the fact that the two of you were an item has to come from someone else? How naïve can you be, Sam?”

  “I barely remember that time; I never think of Taylor that way. We only dated for a few months.” He set the article on Camilla’s desk and held out his hands beseechingly. “Why should this make any difference? This was almost fifteen years ago! And it certainly doesn’t give me any kind of motive for killing her. I just thought of her as Victoria’s friend, not my girlfriend. How well do you know your boyfriends from more than ten years ago, Lena?”

  I shrugged. “It’s not just what the reporters will do. It’s that we met last night, and we tried to find any sort of clue or link that we could, and you failed to mention a very obvious one. Why would you do that? Is your life so private that you can’t share it with the people who care about you?”

  Sam sat speechless, looking from me to Camilla and back again. “I’m sorry—I still don’t see the point here. It was just a college fling. We both forgot about it pretty quickly. It was never—sexual. She was just Vic’s friend, and so my friend by association. Those couple of months in college are irrelevant.”

  Camilla saw my rising anger and held up a hand. “I understand your confusion, Sam, but look at it this way. You don’t think that your link with Taylor is relevant, but it’s not what you think that matters here: it’s what motivated someone to kill her. And in seeking out that motivation, we have to look down every possible avenue, even those in the past.”

  Sam sighed. “Fair enough. Lena, don’t hold this against me. I didn’t—it didn’t dawn on me that my entire life had to become an open book. It’s not that this was private, it’s that it was irrelevant to me. It’s history, and I never think of it.”

  I nodded. I believed him, but some residual anger remained, and I wasn’t sure why. As always, Camilla seemed to read my mind. “I think Lena is afraid, Sam. She worries about you, and what the world will try to do to you with every little fact that they can use as a weapon. She doesn’t want you giving them any ammunition.”

  Sam shrugged. “I have armor,” he said. “And I’ve survived their weapons before.”

  I would have responded, but the doorbell rang, and we all stiffened. The reporter was here, and our interrogation was about to begin.

  7

  The man in the dark coat seemed impervious to the cold; indeed, he seemed to generate warmth.

  —From Death on the Danube

  JAKE ELLIOTT CROSSED Camilla’s threshold looking at home, once again, in the frigid Blue Lake climate. Camilla took his hat and coat and hung them on a hook near the door. She invited him into the dining room, where the four of us sat around a table and Elliott, after smoothing his hands over his bald head, as though to tame the hair he had once possessed, set up a small laptop computer. Rhonda had arrived just before Elliott, and she bustled in with a teapot and some scones. The table had been set when we arrived.

  Elliott took two scones immediately and set them on his plate. He didn’t seem shy or awkward, which I grudgingly admired. He also wanted to get right to the point. He typed a few things on his computer and then said, “Thanks for talking with me today, Mr. West. Before I ask anything, I’ll need to know the truth behind certain recent allegations.”

  Sam’s lip curled. “You mean about the latest murder I am supposed to have committed?”

  Elliott looked surprised. “No, I mean about your alleged lover.”

  We all stared at him with blank expressions. “I’m sorry?” Sam said.

  Elliott nodded. “So you haven’t seen it?”

  “Seen what?” asked Camilla, her voice crisp.

  “An online news story broke this afternoon, after all of the murder stories. It was timed very carefully, I think, to get the most traffic. It alleges that Mr. West has a secret lover.”

  He turned his computer toward us, and I gasped. Under the headline “Sam West Seen Embracing Secret Woman” was a large photograph of Sam and me, locked in an embrace and staring into each other’s eyes, our faces only inches apart. It was clear that it had been taken the previous evening, when I had chased Sam out into the snowy yard, and Camilla’s security lights had illuminated our meeting for whomever might have been lurking in the woods nearby . . .

  “This is an invasion,” Camilla said.

  Elliott shrugged. “It’s not the only picture. You know how these guys work. They’re not worried about hurting your feelings. They want to sell a story.” He scrolled down and we were treated to photos of our whole meeting: my seemingly angry confrontation of Sam, our scowling faces as we argued, my hands clasping Sam’s shoulders, and then, finally, several photos of our passionate kissing.

  “Oh, God,” I said.

  Sam sat up straight, his expression resigned. “Fine. So now they know. Lena and I were trying to remain discreet until I could find out what happened to Victoria, but I have no problem telling people that I am romantically interested in Lena London. I didn’t want it to happen this way, and that’s exactly what Lena and I were discussing in those photos. She wanted to go public with our relationship, and I wanted the press to leave her alone. As you can see, they didn’t.”

  Elliott tore a scone in half. “Fair enough. And is this a recent relationship?”

  Sam nodded. “Yes. Lena was the woman who got me out of jail a couple of months ago. She had the audacity to believe in me when the rest of the world was content to watch me go down for a murder that hadn’t actually happened. Lena kept digging, even when there was no place to dig, and she accidentally found the picture that exonerated me.”

  Now Elliott looked interested. “Is that so?” he said, turning to study me. “I was curious to know how all of that went down. We’ll certainly want to discuss that now.” He took a big bite of a scone and then moaned a little. “That is incredib
ly good.”

  “Please help yourself to as many as you like,” Camilla said. “I fear we three have rather lost our appetites.”

  Elliott swallowed and took a sip of tea. “Don’t let the Internet gossip get you down. As Mr. West has suggested, it’s probably better that this is out in the open. It might even create a bit of sympathy for him. People love a romance. And it doesn’t hurt that Miss London is pretty.” He held up his hands at my expression. “That’s not an insult; that’s based on statistics and the reality of proven public response.”

  I held out my hand. “May I see the byline on that story?”

  He pushed his computer toward me. I scrolled back up, forced to look once again at the photos of Sam and me. Now that I’d gotten over the shock, I saw that there was nothing scandalous about the photos; we looked like two people having an intense discussion, and then kissing each other. The pictures were surprisingly clear, thanks to Camilla’s security light, and what they captured on our faces made me feel a burst of warmth and happiness in the midst of my displeasure. It was clear how much Sam cared. I got to the top of the article, where the byline read “Theodore Strayer.”

  “Who’s Theodore Strayer?” I asked, pushing the computer back.

  “Ah, Ted Strayer,” Elliott said. “He got into town even before I did. He’s good at being where the action is, but he’s not as concerned about getting the story right as he is about getting the story, if you know what I mean. He’s right here in town, staying at the Red Roof, or Red Door, or something like that.”

  I stiffened. “I met a man named Ted. He spoke to me and pretended to be a tourist taking in the sights. He looked like Ned Flanders.”

  Elliott laughed. “Ha! That’s Ted, all right. The mustache is new, though. Maybe it’s keeping his lip warm in this godforsaken, frozen town.”

  “It’s winter everywhere,” Camilla said.

  “Yeah, but there’s something about Blue Lake. I’ve been all over the world and I thought I was relatively used to every temperature. But something about this place—the cold just gets into your bones. It has a Siberian quality.”