How about not, how about we just hope they go away?
Then Brian suggested the trip.
37
Chevy Chase
Winter was almost over now. Days longer, sun chasing away the cold. Spring coming.
In Brian’s mind, a seed taking purchase. Laying down roots.
A wooden box riding a conveyor belt into a crematorium. Hot enough to burn any sin.
The body of his wife inside.
He didn’t know what Becks knew. Or if she knew anything. They hadn’t talked much the last couple of weeks. She’d been busy. Working three big cases, she said. Awfully coincidental. Then again anyone with a pulse knew the Russians were making trouble these days.
If he had to bet, he’d bet she had no idea. Mainly because he didn’t think she could act well enough to fool him. Could she still talk to him? Sleep next to him? Fuck him? Back in Houston, he’d sniffed out her little quasi-fling with the ranger right quick.
Though in Birmingham, she’d played the fat real estate guy, Draymond, played him all the way to the federal penitentiary. Becks was a straight shooter. Until she wasn’t. So yeah, he’d bet she didn’t know. But the bet wasn’t a lock. More of a coin flip. He couldn’t risk his life on a coin flip.
And he was flat-out tired of not knowing, having no way to find out. If she was on to him, anything he asked her might help her. He’d gone over his car, his phone, his laptop. All clean. Then again Becks must know better than to try to track his phone or laptop.
It wasn’t fair, what she’d done to him.
He didn’t feel guilty. No way, no how. He hadn’t done anything all that bad. Kira had gone through a couple of hard days, sure, but she’d come out the other side. Maybe it had even done her some good. Toughened her up, given her an edge over the average twenty-year-old snowflake at Tufts.
Nah, he didn’t feel guilty. He just wanted to be rid of his wife.
But he had to make sure he did it clean. Not much point to beating an espionage rap and getting stung for murder. The cell would look the same either way.
And a clean murder wasn’t so easy. Especially with Becks. The bureau would look hard at anything like a mugging. Poison was super high-risk. What if the cops talked to the FBI and decided they wanted an autopsy?
Maybe a fire? A fire had worked out for Jacques in Spain. Tough to get evidence from charcoal. Kill Becks, set fire to the house. But Chevy Chase wasn’t the middle of nowhere. Probably a fire would get put out too quick. He couldn’t take the chance.
He needed something better. Something he could count on.
No witnesses.
No cops stumbling onto the scene.
No physical evidence.
No body, or a body in such terrible shape that it had no secrets to give.
No murder for hire, that idea never ever worked. I’m gonna give you money to kill my wife. Promise you’re not a cop, mmmkay?
No chance for Becks to draw on him. A problem, considering that she carried her nine on her hip most of the time they weren’t home. He could ask her to take it off, sure, but he’d need a decent reason.
An accident.
Yeah, an accident would be best. Plus, Kira and Tony had been through enough. Especially Kira. For her sake, he needed to be sure she accepted what had happened. Poor Becks, poor poor Becks. The story couldn’t just satisfy the cops. It had to be airtight.
A plausible accident. A story that made sense. Not, Becks was wandering around East Baltimore at 2 a.m. Not, Becks and I went for a cliffside walk in Glacier National Park. Even though it was raining. Not, Becks decided she’d take her BMW up to 120 on the Beltway last night, hey, why not?
Yeah, killing your wife clean wasn’t as easy as it looked.
But it was just a puzzle, after all. And he was good at puzzles. It had to have a solution.
Sure enough he found it.
He had the perfect excuse, too. Their twenty-first anniversary. A chance to get away. Put the kidnapping behind them. Go back to an island they hadn’t visited since she was in law school and he was a guy with a rusted pickup truck and a two-minute refractory period.
* * *
“Let’s go to St. Barts,” he said. “A second honeymoon. Decompress. Rent a boat for a couple of nights. No crew, just you and me. We can hang out—”
“Hang out,” Becks said.
“Mmm-hmm, hang out. We’re still pretty good at that.”
“You’re not scared to leave Kira?”
“The opposite. It proves we trust her, we’re okay with not talking to her for a couple of days.”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it this way. It’ll be a way to wash off what happened in Spain. We deserve a happy anniversary. Twenty-one years together. Practically half our lives.”
“Twenty-one years,” Becks said. “Can’t believe it.”
“Neither can I, babe. Neither can I.”
38
St. Barts
The hotel was perfect. The food was perfect. The weather was perfect.
The sex was… weirdly enough… perfect.
The Fleur de Lis, where they’d stayed twenty-one years before for their honeymoon, had closed. But early April wasn’t peak season, and Brian found them a deal at one of the island’s fanciest resorts. Their villa had a private terrace overlooking the white sand and blue-green sea of St. Jean Bay. The most beautiful place Rebecca had ever seen. If water could be soft, this water was.
* * *
For two days they hardly left their room.
When he reached for her on the third morning, she shook her head. “I can’t. I haven’t been this sore in a really long time.”
In the bathroom she stared herself down, her frown lines, gray roots, the little stress chip in her top right front tooth. But their sex had made her young. Temporarily.
How many orgasms had she had with him over the years? Thousands, surely. Do the math. Ten thousand? Couldn’t be that many. That would be more than one a day. Two thousand, three, four? So many bursts of pleasure, so many little deaths. Adding up to nothing at all. Even his were more useful. For him they carried his seed.
Yet these two days reminded her of the power of sex. Especially good sex. It might not mean anything in the long run. But in the moment it was everything. They’d been tender to each other. They’d cuddled and spooned. They’d watched the sky turn pink from their terrace. Not saying a word, just being present. The afterglow was real. The halo.
Sex had bound them. Then children, its fruit.
What bound them now?
Lies. Did he know that she knew? He couldn’t; she’d covered her tracks, hadn’t written anything down. But he could suspect. He would suspect. He’d be a fool not to suspect, and he wasn’t a fool.
* * *
He opened the bathroom door. He looked good. His arms were big. Like he’d been working out.
Getting ready for something.
Lucky for her, she’d been working out too.
She ran her hands over his biceps.
“Babe. I’m going to rent the boat. I’m thinking maybe get one with a decent-sized cabin. So if we spend the night on the water it won’t be a problem.”
“Stay out for the night? Considering what we’re paying for this room.”
“Might be fun. Blast from the past.”
* * *
A few minutes later she was showered, dressed, alone on the terrace. A warm subtropical breeze tickled her wet hair.
A boat ride, then.
Rebecca had never actually been involved in a water case. The local cops or state police handled those, sometimes with the Coast Guard. The FBI involved itself only in exceptional situations. Still, she knew investigating accidents at sea was notoriously difficult. No witnesses except fish. Not much physical evidence. Bodies disappeared. When they didn’t, they were waterlogged, in bad shape. Even fires left more evidence. At least arson investigators could usually tell if they’d been set on purpose.
Still
. Twenty-one years ago they had rented a cruiser, spent a night on the water. Slow, passionate sex as the stars swam slowly overhead. No one to hear her, so she could give full voice to her pleasure. It was possible she’d never felt more connected to Brian than she had on that boat. She thought she’d gotten pregnant with Kira that night. Her body had felt different even the next morning. Richer. Fuller. Something new in her. How could she know? And yet she had. She’d told Brian but he’d always seemed skeptical. Pointless to try to explain to a man, pregnancy was something you had to live.
Maybe Brian remembered too. Maybe he wanted to bring them together. Maybe he thought he could survive forever as a Russian spy and as a husband and father, that now that they had Kira back equilibrium had been restored.
Maybe.
Back inside the room. This was the first time he’d left her alone, the first time either had left the room without the other. She went to his suitcase, which wasn’t a suitcase at all. He still traveled with the battered soft-sided blue bag he had used for a decade or more. Brian wasn’t a clotheshorse and he wasn’t a snob. When he found something that worked for him—a pair of sneakers, a haircut, a bag—he stuck with it.
Maybe his loyalty to his possessions substituted for love of other human beings.
The bag was in the closet along with her Tumi suitcase. She felt through it. Mostly empty. A couple of novels—John Sandford, the hard-boiled thrillers he liked these days—and a navigational guide to St. Barts and the eastern Caribbean. No knife, no Taser, no pistol, no handcuffs or gloves. Really, what had she expected? Then, tucked in the corner, she felt a plastic bag, something thick and flat inside.
She pulled it out.
A black bag, taped to conceal a bundle. She pushed at it. No give. But when she twisted the ends they flexed. She wondered if she needed to tear it open to be sure about what was inside, decided not to bother.
What object with these physical characteristics could this bag be hiding? Could it be… a bundle of US currency?
She turned the bag over in her hands, feeling its heft. How much money? If the bills were hundreds, maybe twenty or thirty thousand in all. She had to assume they were. Otherwise why go to such lengths to hide them? And where had he come up with them? They had a joint bank account. No way could he have taken out that much money without her knowing.
Even more important, why so much? He couldn’t need it to pay for the trip. The resort preferred credit cards, and paying in advance. They’d talked about going to the casinos on St. Martin. But if he planned to pay thousand-dollar-a-hand blackjack, or whatever, he’d have to do it when she wasn’t watching.
Yet thirty thousand dollars wasn’t thirty million. It wasn’t like Brian could buy a new life with it. Maybe… an insurance policy? A way to make unexpected problems disappear? And give him a head start if he had to run.
Whatever the money was for, it wasn’t reassuring.
She tossed the bundle in the bag, stuffed the bag in the closet, went to his dresser. Underwear and socks in the top drawer, the hipster T-shirts and raggedy shorts he preferred in the second. He took care folding his clothes. A subtle rebuke to her; her suits and skirts were expensive and she had to admit she didn’t always take the best care of them, didn’t always hang them when she came home. Then again he hadn’t been the one working twelve-hour days, was he?
She sorted through the undies and socks. Nothing. She ran her hands through his T-shirts, his shorts.
Felt plastic.
She pulled it out. A tiny orange bottle, no label. When she unscrewed the cap and flipped its contents into her palm, she saw the pills weren’t pills at all. They were tiny white bars, sectioned in halves. Xanax bars. Xanax was a prescription benzodiazepine, a cousin of Valium.
She counted the bars in her hand, six… seven… eight.
Benzodiazepines were powerful drugs. Two two-milligram Xanax bars would get an average adult seriously high. In combination with an opioid or alcohol, benzos could kill. By themselves, they didn’t depress breathing enough to be lethal except with a massive overdose. Rebecca didn’t think eight bars would be enough to kill her. But they would knock her out for sure.
Thirty K in cash and sixteen milligrams of Xanax. Curiouser and curiouser.
How long could she wait? How clear would the signals have to be? For now she was still paralyzed. She was operating under strict rules of engagement. Until she knew he planned to hurt her, she couldn’t do anything except watch and wait.
She wondered if her rules would get her killed.
So be it. She had never thought of herself as a martyr, but she couldn’t make herself move first.
She heard steps on the path that led to the villa, Brian whistling tunelessly. She tilted the bars from her palm back into the bottle. One slipped onto the floor, visible against the polished wood. She nudged it under the dresser, stuffed the bottle back in the drawer. Hoping she hadn’t ruffled dear hubby’s T-shirts too much, hoping he hadn’t counted his benzos.
She popped open the privacy lock just as he reached it, realizing how stupid she’d been to lock it in place. The door swung open and there he stood. His eyebrows rose when he saw her.
“I thought maybe I’d get a massage.” She kissed him. “Since I’m so sore.”
“I got us a boat. For tomorrow.”
“I can’t wait.”
39
Caribbean Sea, east of St. Barts
The islands of the Caribbean take a hard right turn just east of Saint Barthélemy. Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica lay to the west, nearer Florida. To the south, a chain of smaller islands runs to Trinidad, just off the coast of South America.
So as Brian steered the Chris-Craft east, he was moving them toward the hinge of the turn, away from the calmer waters of the Caribbean and toward the Atlantic Ocean. The change was gradual. Even in early spring the Atlantic was fairly calm. They were still a couple of months from hurricane season.
Still, mile by mile, the waters were slowly becoming choppier, less blue. Cooler. Less friendly.
Brian wondered if Becks had noticed.
Then again, the boat they were on was distracting. Brian had splurged to rent a Chris-Craft Launch 36, four years old but still a beautiful ride, teak and leather and chrome, all the creature comforts four hundred thousand dollars could buy. Plus a super-modern navigation system. The Chris-Craft had been built more for comfort than hard-core open-water cruising. Its sun pad—a pair of recliners between windshield and prow—didn’t exactly scream North Atlantic in January.
Still, the boat was more than capable of handling the Caribbean, especially on a sunny April afternoon, the biggest obstacle a light westerly breeze. The cruiser had a kitchen too, so they could boil the lobsters Becks had picked up in Gustavia. And a small stateroom. In case they decided to stay out overnight.
Brian was sure he would. Becks, not so much.
Maybe when she was gone he’d come back here and give the Chris-Craft another spin. Maybe Irlov would even give him another weekend with Eve if he was a good boy.
Eve wouldn’t mind. Eve did what Irlov said. So did Brian.
When Becks was gone.
Funny. He was in such a good mood. He already missed his wife, though she wasn’t even gone. The last few days had reminded him what he liked about her. Her confidence. Her appetites, sexual and otherwise. For the first time in years, maybe since Charlottesville, work wasn’t consuming her.
He realized now, maybe Becks should never have had kids. Maybe she’d never been able to balance being a mom with being an FBI agent. Maybe she’d been jealous of the time he spent with Kira and Tony when they were little. Anyway, she’d taken her frustration out on him.
But being here had freed her, at least for a few days.
Good for her. Her last memories would be happy ones. He’d make sure to tell the kids how much fun she’d had.
The kids were really the only reason he’d considered hesitating. But they were old enough now to know their parents wouldn�
�t live forever. He’d always been more important to them than Becks anyway. They’d bounce back. Plus, after what Kira had gone through last year…
No. This was the right choice, he was sure.
* * *
Three p.m. and they were thirty miles east of St. Barts, heading east at about nine knots. Nice and easy. With GPS, radar, sonar, and electronic depth charts, these high-end cruisers could practically steer themselves. In fact, drop the practically. They could. When Brian decided to take the boat back to Gustavia, he could simply find it on the nav. The Chris-Craft would do the rest, directing him where to go and how to get there. He could even put the boat on autopilot and let it steer.
The calm spring water and the security the cruiser’s automated systems offered were the real reason he’d been able to rent it so easily, after taking only a four-hour training class the day before. Basically, he promised he wouldn’t take it into the Atlantic and that he’d let the autopilot handle the harbor water, the only dangerous part. Like cars, ships these days only pretended the human beings at their helms were in charge. The fact he was paying three thousand dollars to rent it for a day, and another twenty-five hundred if he kept it overnight, probably helped too.
Naturally he hadn’t told Becks how much he’d paid. She would have wondered why he was spending so much. She might even have insisted on a smaller cruiser. And he wanted the biggest one he could find, the one that would handle the chop the best.
The rougher the waves, the browner the water, the better.
They’d seen plenty of other boats around St. Barts. But in the last hour the waters around them had emptied out. No surprise. Cruisers here hopped island to island, heading southeast from St. Barts to Antigua, avoiding these rougher seas. The big cargo ships ran well to the north, in the deep waters of the Atlantic. Now they could see only a couple of other ships. The closest was a massive yacht maybe a mile south. But it was moving fast, twenty-five knots, running west, away from them. Brian had hoped they’d achieve complete solitude, no other boats in sight, just them and the fish. He saw now that he wouldn’t necessarily be able to count on that level of privacy. No matter. As long as no other ships were within a couple of miles, he’d be fine.
The Power Couple Page 35
