“I understand,” Tristram said, forcing a smile. “I understand completely.”
The Roundtable meeting concluded without further incident. The knights left the Stuyvesant Suite in the inverse order of their arrival. Kevin considered trying to waylay Gawaine and demand an explanation. But he did not know the man’s room number, and the danger of discovery in hanging too close to the meeting room was too great. Instead, he returned to his own room, his feelings roiling.
Kelly, wearing only her panties, lay on the bed watching a movie, eating grapes left over from dinner. She seemed completely at ease.
Kevin tossed her dress across her lap.
“Go,” he said.
“But you have me until morning.”
He took a fifty from his wallet and set it in her hand.
“I won’t tell anyone and I don’t want you to. Just be careful leaving. I’ll see you next time.”
Kelly tossed the dress aside, stood on her tiptoes and kissed him hungrily. He cupped her breast in his hand. Her nipple instantly swelled to his touch. Her smooth, lean body melted into his.
“I want you,” she whispered.
For a frozen minute his thoughts were only of her. He had not yet given in and made love with her. But he knew he was drawing closer with every moment they were together. Perhaps that was what he really needed, he began thinking. Not to face the demons that were suddenly tormenting him, but to escape them.
“I want you,” she moaned again. Still on her tiptoes, she took his swollen cock and worked it between her thighs. “I want you inside me so much.”
He took her by the shoulders and forced her to arm’s length. She was part of them—an extension of The Roundtable. One of the shadow names. The piece she was about to take from him would bind him even more tightly to the society. Perhaps she was even to be rewarded for getting him to fuck her.
See, Tristram, you can do it, The Roundtable would be saying to him. You can do anything!
“Get out,” he snapped. “Right now.”
The hurt on her face seemed genuine. Kevin almost laughed out loud at her skill. She dropped her dress on over her head and turned to allow him to zip it up.
“Next time?” she asked.
“We’ll see. Now please, go.”
Kevin waited several seconds after the door had locked behind her and then splashed an inch of bourbon into a tumbler and gulped it down. Until he had read Beth DeSenza’s name on Merlin’s printout, none of The Roundtable’s programs had ever presented even the slightest moral dilemma for him. But they were programs that largely involved laws and the people who made them. The insurance commissioner was a pompous, politically motivated bastard—fair game in Kevin’s view. The corporate sabotage made perfect sense given the dog-eat-dog climate of the insurance business. But this was different. This was a flesh and blood person. He could handle standing back behind the lines, lobbing shells down on the enemy. But this was hand-to-hand combat. And suddenly, the enemy had eyes.
Kevin was in over his head. He knew it now. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it—except to adjust. The price of a ticket on this ride was a twelve-room house and a secure future for himself and his family. He had paid the fare. Now he had no choice but to hang on and make the best of it. The next time Kelly asked, he would be ready for … whatever.
He had poured another two fingers when the phone began ringing.
“Tristram,” he said.
“It’s Gawaine,” the knight whispered. “Can you talk?”
“Yes, I’m alone.”
“You sent your girl home?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus. You are asking for trouble. Mine’s in the other room.”
“What’s going on? Why did you stop me at the meeting?”
“I know your name. Do you know mine?”
“No.”
“It’s Stallings. Jim Stallings. I’m a vice president with the Manhattan offices of Interstate Health Care.”
Kevin knew the gargantuan managed care company well. He had once interviewed for a sales job with them.
“Go on,” he said.
“Loomis, we’ve got to talk. Tomorrow, noon sharp. Can you make it?”
“I can, but—”
“Battery Park. The benches on the Hudson side. Just be damn sure you’re not followed.”
“But—”
“Please, Loomis. Wait until tomorrow at noon, and be careful.”
“One thing,” Kevin said quickly. “Did you see the picture of that woman DellaRosa?”
“Of course I did.”
“And do you think it’s Desiree?”
“I never had any doubt about it. It was you I had doubts about. I wasn’t sure if you were one of them or not. But after tonight I’m willing to take the chance that you’re still an outsider like me. In fact, I’m betting my life on it.”
Kevin listened to the dial tone for several seconds. Then he set the receiver down and walked to the window. Fourteen stories below, scant early-morning traffic flowed in slow motion along largely deserted streets. A cab pulled up and stopped directly beneath his window. A woman wearing a tight, iridescent red dress hurried out and climbed inside. The lady without a name.
The cab rolled to the corner and then turned uptown. Kevin sensed that he had seen the girl, stroked her magnificent, taut body, for the last time. He glanced at his watch. Eleven hours. Eleven hours until Battery Park.
CHAPTER 24
At three-thirty in the morning, Maura gave up trying to sleep and tiptoed from the small guest room to the den. Through his partially open door, she could see Harry asleep in the master bedroom. For a time after they returned from C.C.’s Cellar, she had thought he might ask her to join him there. He liked her. That seemed clear. But there were reasons—plenty of them—why he would want to keep some distance between them. Key among them was that she had given in to her frustration and her demons and had been drinking that afternoon.
It was just as well, she thought. She wasn’t ready for an emotional entanglement any more than he was. Still, she couldn’t remember the last time a man’s looks had turned her on so. And more important, he was one of the kindest, most decent men she had ever met. It would have been nice just to curl up in his arms for a night and let the chips fall where they may.
She turned on the den light and ran her finger over the volumes in the bookcase, searching for something light—very light. Then again, she thought, perhaps heavy would be better. She pulled out a thin paperback of poems by Lord Byron. Evelyn DellaRosa was written in perfect script inside the cover. Evie was, of course, another valid reason for Harry’s maintaining distance between them. Maura closed the book and slid it back. She and Harry had been through so much since his wife’s death that it was difficult to remember it had only been a few weeks.
She scanned the shelves once more and finally settled on a coffee-table book on Ireland. In six hours she and Harry were scheduled to meet with Pavel Nemec. Maura desperately wanted the session to work out. Connecting with the face that was locked in her subconscious would just about balance her humiliation at having fallen off the wagon. She had never been hypnotized before and had no idea whether being sleepless for the entire preceding night would be a plus or a minus. On the other hand, if the legendary Hungarian was as incredible as his reputation, it probably didn’t matter.
As Harry had predicted, the moment Nemec heard his request, a time slot had been cleared out for them.
“Exactly what did you do for his son?” Maura asked after Harry told her about the appointment.
“Ricard? Nothing, really. I just did a routine physical for music camp,” he said. “He plays the French horn.”
“And?”
“And I found a little lump that I didn’t like beneath one arm.”
“Cancer?”
“Hodgkin’s disease, actually. Thank God it was in an early stage. It’s been about six years now, so he’s considered a cure.”
He said it all so
matter-of-factly, like she might talk about mixing paints. But Maura knew about school physicals and camp physicals and such. She had had enough of them to know that most doctors did nothing but listen to your heart. But Harry hadn’t dealt with Pavel Nemec’s son in such a cursory way. Harry had been … Harry.
Maura reflected on what he had told her of the drama swirling around him at the hospital—the call from his friend Atwater asking him to remove himself from the staff; the hearing that was being arranged to decide whether or not he would be allowed to continue to practice there.
Harry Corbett didn’t deserve that sort of treatment, she thought angrily. She brushed her fingers across her feathery new hair and along the still-sensitive margins of her craniotomy scar. He also didn’t deserve the treatment she had given him. Drinking again had been petulant, immature, and stupid. She was lucky he hadn’t just handed her a bottle and booted her out.
“No more,” she muttered, knowing that she had failed to honor the same pledge many times before. “That’s it, lady. Not one more drop.”
She flipped through a few pages of Irish countryside and felt her eyelids grow heavy. She wondered what it would feel like to be hypnotized—if it would feel like anything at all. O’Brien’s Tower atop the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare blurred, then faded.
No more. The words echoed in her mind. Not one more drop …
The aroma of brewing coffee worked its way into her consciousness. She opened her eyes a slit.
Pale morning light filtered into the den from between buildings. Harry sat on the easy chair beside the sofa. He was dressed in gray sweats with a towel draped around his neck, and had obviously just finished a workout. His dark hair glistened with sweat, and the color in his cheeks made his rugged good looks just that much more appealing.
Maura reached over dreamily and squeezed his hand.
“What time is it?” she said.
“After seven. We still have a while if you want to doze off again. I’m just being selfish by waking you up like this.”
“Then I’ll be even more selfish and stay awake.”
“How do you feel?”
“Sober.”
She knew it was the only word he really wanted to hear.
“You ready to have your brain probed by The Hungarian?”
“I am. He had just better be set to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
“He’s a wizard—at least that’s what I’ve been told. Hey, listen. Evie’s three-hundred-dollar coffeemaker is hard at work in the kitchen. The first thing she did after the wedding was to give away my Mr. Coffee. Hers goes to the gourmet shop by itself, mixes the perfect blend, then grinds, brews, and samples it.”
“With that buildup, I’m all taste buds.”
“How do you take it?”
“After yesterday you have to ask?”
Harry smiled.
“Black it is,” he said.
Maura had never paid a great deal of attention to her looks. One ex-lover had said that was because she had never had to. Today, though, she took a bit more time than usual getting ready—a little makeup, the enamel earrings Harry liked, and a cotton dress instead of her trademark jeans.
She felt keyed up at the prospect of what lay ahead—frightened that the session would be a bust, but almost equally apprehensive about other possibilities. Over the two and a half years of her downward spiral she had been a blackout drinker, with little regard for the places she went or the company she kept. Now she wondered just how selective Pavel Nemec could be in unlocking her memory. Most of what was hidden away in her subconscious might just as well stay right where it was.
Nemec lived and worked at an address on the Upper East Side. Before going there, she and Harry took a cab to his office, stopping at her place to pick up an artist’s sketch pad, some pencils, and some pastels, and at his bank to withdraw fifteen hundred dollars.
“I’ve canceled another half day at the office and gotten someone to make rounds on my patients in the hospital,” he told her. “Most of my practice is pretty loyal, I think. But I’m really beginning to put some of them to the test.”
She nodded sympathetically. “This is the day,” she said. “This is the day it all begins to turn around. Trust me. Hey, speaking of turning around, turn this way a bit. I want to try something.”
He did as she asked, and in less than two blocks she had sketched a passable likeness of him. By the time they reached the office, the drawing was quite good.
“That’s amazing,” he said.
“I can do better. But at least this tells me I can do it at all. It’s been a while. I actually once spent a summer in Italy doing sketches and caricatures for the tourists on the Piazza Navona.”
Walter Concepcion was already in the waiting room, chatting with the woman behind the reception desk, whom Maura learned was Mary Tobin. Maura was glad to see him again. Today he wore a black T-shirt, and she noticed that his arms were sinewy and more muscular than she would have expected. He had a tattoo over his left deltoid, artfully done, of a skull with a serpent slithering out of one eye.
“They called from Dr. Erdman’s office at the hospital,” Mary said. “The meeting is scheduled for ten tomorrow morning in the conference room next to his office.”
Harry sighed.
“I guess you’ll have to call my morning appointments arid cancel them again.”
“I already did.”
“This is getting ridiculous. You know, maybe we should just close up shop for a while.”
The older woman’s eyes flashed.
“You do,” she said, “and I’m gonna find me one of those bamboo canes. You know, the ones that take flesh off with the second stroke …”
“Okay, okay. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.”
“Fine. I called your attorney to tell him the time. He wants you to call him later today, but he said he’ll be there.”
“At three hundred fifty an hour, why shouldn’t he be?”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing, Mary. Nothing. I’m just in my irritable idiot mode is all. It never lasts long.”
“Thank goodness,” she said.
Harry handed Concepcion the money in an envelope. It was clear to Maura that Harry still had doubts about the man. But she had absolutely none. Walter had already given them a place to start—the first steps of a counterattack.
“Okay, we’re in business,” Concepcion said, pocketing the envelope. “And don’t worry, Harry. Every dollar of this will be accounted for on paper—receipts and all. I actually think we got off to a running start last night. After I got home I called about forty escort services. My line to them was that a woman named Desiree had given me the night of my life when I was last in town six months ago. Unfortunately for me, a friend had made the arrangements, and I had no way of getting hold of him for the name of the escort service. Money was no problem, but only if it was for Desiree. Three of the services made it sound as if they knew her. They said they’d try to get in touch with her and I should call back. A fourth one, Elegance, said she wasn’t working for them anymore. That’s the one I’m homing in on.”
“Why that one?” Maura asked.
“Because the woman I spoke to initially gave me vague answers about Desiree. She took my number and said I’d be called. About an hour later, a different woman called. She said her name was Page. I think she runs the business. We played cat and mouse for a time. I mentioned money as often as I could. She denied knowing anyone named Desiree as often as she could. Finally I told her that I knew Desiree was dead, and I just wanted some information about her. I offered her five hundred dollars just to talk with me in person for half an hour. Not one minute more. And she didn’t have to answer any questions about Desiree that she didn’t want to. I was sure she was going to say no. But when she said again that she didn’t know Desiree, I knew I had her. We’re meeting tomorrow morning.”
“That sounds promising,” Maura said.
“It sounds like we’re
about to be taken for five hundred bucks,” Harry muttered.
“You just hang in there with me, boss,” Walter replied, the tic at the corner of his mouth firing off several times. “You don’t seem to know it yet, but what you got here is the detective bargain of the century. Just keep in touch. Maybe we can get together tomorrow night and compare notes. By the way, Maura, I’ll check on an AA meeting for us to go to then if you still want to.”
“I’m ready.”
“You have my number at home,” Harry said. “Call anytime if you learn something.” He hesitated and then added, “Walter, I’m sorry to be giving you a hard time. I’ll try not to.”
Concepcion pinched his own forearm.
“Hey, skin as thick as rhino hide, man,” he said. “Besides, I haven’t done anything yet except cost you money. When I do produce, and I will, I expect you to get off my case.”
He shook hands with them both, waved to Mary Tobin, and headed out.
“Come on,” Harry said. “We can catch a cab on Fifth.”
“Okay,” Maura said, battling a sudden, inexplicable case of nerves, “let’s do it.” She started toward the door and then turned back. “Cross your fingers, Mary,” she said. “We’re off to see the wizard.”
The discreet brass placard above the bell read:
P. Nemec
Behavior Modification
Pavel Nemec greeted them warmly and served them tea and cakes in the oak-paneled Victorian waiting room of his office. He and Harry spent some time catching up on Nemec’s family and on Harry’s life over the years since they had last spoken. He was in his early sixties, Maura guessed, graying and very slight, but fit. She found him charming and unpretentious.
Even so, the free-floating anxiety that had begun to take hold of her in Harry’s office intensified. Maura had tried so hard to reconnect with the face of the man in the white clinic coat. But the harder she tried, the flimsier the memories became. Now, she wondered whether the DTs, and the surgery, and the drugs had distorted reality so much for her that the man, in fact, never did exist.
Her hands were shaking ever so slightly. She abandoned trying to hold her teacup and instead sat quietly as Harry explained their situation. Nemec also listened intently. But midway through Harry’s account, he stood and began pacing slowly behind her chair, pausing twice to rest his hands gently on her shoulders. Then suddenly he bent down, his lips close to her ear.
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