The FBI Thrillers Collection: Vol 11-15

by Catherine Coulter

  Georgie came skipping into the small dining room. "Not twelve, Erin. Daddy can't even eat twelve tacos."

  "So now you're trying to welsh on the bet?"

  Bowie looked from one to the other. "You've got a bet? Twelve tacos?"

  "We didn't actually specify a number," Erin said, and motioned Georgie to her chair. "You get your homework done, sweetie?"

  Bowie did a double take. He watched his daughter slip into her seat, shake her head at Erin. "You're nagging, Erin. I got nearly all of it done, but Daddy needs to help me with the grammar part. We have to put in commas and periods. Okay, Daddy? After dinner?"

  Bowie nodded. Georgie had been living with Erin for only two days, and here Erin was acting like her mother? The thought stopped him cold. He had to bring this case to a close so he could get his daughter out of here, away from Erin. He didn't care that Erin Pulaski was smart and nice and sincerely liked his daughter, and liked him too, he thought; there was no way he was traveling down that road again, not after Beth. His brain froze as it always did when he thought of Beth, like he'd stepped to the edge of a black hole and leaped back. At least the memories no longer burst through into his dreams to give him nightmares. And that made him think of Krissy, which was odd. He and Krissy had been friends, with benefits, for nearly four months, but neither of them wanted anything more, at least he had thought that. He said easily to his daughter, "I got a call from Krissy today. She sends you her love. She wants to bring you something from Harrods in London. Is there anything in particular you'd like?"

  "What's Harrods?"

  "It's a big, gorgeous department store," Erin said, "with more cool stuff than you can imagine, including this huge floor just for food, with everything from candy to filet mignon. Me, I love their stuffed olives."

  "Okay, tell Krissy we'd really like some olives. I don't know about stuffing them, though."

  Bowie's eyebrow shot up. "What is this, Georgie? You're ordering food all the way from England? Erin doesn't have enough to share? You won't be here long enough to worry about that. Glynn will be better soon and home again. Don't forget, Erin has that big important client, right, Erin?"

  Does he suspect something isn't right, like Sherlock? She stared down at her taco, her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.

  Sherlock said when Erin didn't reply, "You remember, Erin, your case dealing with drugs, right?"

  Erin said, "You can tell Krissy any of the candies would be great, okay, Georgie? Candy will travel better than stuffed olives. Whatever she brings will make you dance on the ceiling, something I haven't yet figured out how to do. Big case? Well, really, it's not big at all. No, it's not about drugs."

  Hmm. Sherlock said to Georgie, who was all ears, "By any wild chance did you hear us talking before dinner?"

  "Well, maybe I heard some things, Aunt Sherlock."

  Bowie nearly dropped the handful of lettuce he was spreading on top of his taco. Aunt Sherlock?

  Georgie continued, "You know, I might have heard some stuff when I got real close to the door. Erin's walls aren't very thick, you know. It's an apartment, and Daddy says apartments have crappy construction."

  "Well, I didn't say exactly that," Bowie said. "Don't say 'crap,' Georgie."

  "I didn't say 'crap' exactly, Daddy."

  "Close enough. Whatever."

  Georgie gave her father a sweet smile and continued, "Erin knows lots of neat things. She's known people in Europe speak English for years and years. I think I knew it too."

  God bless this wonderful child, Erin thought, as she spooned taco meat into a tortilla shell, carefully handed it to her, and waved at the bowls of lettuce, tomatoes, and cheese. "Add whatever you want. Years and years? That makes me sound about a hundred."

  "No, Grandma's about a hundred," Georgie said, and sprinkled cheddar on her taco.

  Bowie was looking at her, too many questions in his eyes, and so Erin proceeded to lie, clean as a whistle. "It wasn't years and years ago. When I was twenty I took off a year to bum around Europe. I began to notice that business people, especially in international companies, sometimes spoke three, four different languages, English included. I decided it must be a requirement for upward mobility." She never raised her head, concentrated on her own taco. "Except in France, of course. I think if you speak English in France, you can be guillotined as a traitor."

  Bowie was diverted, just as she'd intended. He laughed, couldn't help it. "Sherlock, should I send Dolores Cliff back to JFK tomorrow to fetch the two Schiffer Hartwin gentlemen?"

  She said, "It appears they're going to control our access to them much better than that. Dillon told me they're being transported here in a proper big limo, one of those eighteen-foot jobbers, I bet. I wouldn't be surprised if the lawyers will already be in the limo to brief the bigwigs on the drive here to Stone Bridge."

  Bowie said, "I'd sure like to be in that limo with them. I'm thinking they've got to be really concerned to come here themselves to try to defuse this."

  Sherlock said easily, "I hope they're really scared. Dillon called and got the DOJ to look into the Culovort shortage, so things may get even scarier for them sooner than they know."

  "We could phone Jane Ann, see if her husband will be with the lawyers in the limo. You think she'd tell us, Sherlock?"

  Erin? What did she have to do with Jane Ann Royal? He said, "I want to hear about your meeting with her, Sherlock," Bowie said, and shot Erin a look.

  "Erin and I met with her this afternoon. We'll tell you all about it after dinner, Bowie, after you've helped Georgie with her commas and periods."

  Sherlock continued, "I'm wondering what their lawyers will be cooking up for Dieffendorf and Gerlach to tell us."

  Georgie said, "Lawyers are a pain in the ass."

  "What?" Bowie said, his second taco halfway to his mouth.

  "I've heard you say that, Daddy, several times. You were pretty pissed off."

  " You listen to me, kiddo, you do not say that word either. Nor do you say 'crap.' Okay? It's not polite, particularly for a kid. You've got to be eighteen before you can say those things."

  "All the kids at school say them, and lots more stuff. I even heard my teacher tell her ex-husband to piss off just outside the classroom. All of us heard her. And he was really mad. He stomped off down the hall, we heard that too. When Mrs. Reems came back in, her face was red."

  Bowie looked ready to laugh and yell at the same time.

  Erin took Georgie's face between her hands. "Listen to me, Small Person, your dad's right. Eighteen is the magic number in your future. Until you're eighteen, you have to try to have the cleanest mouth in Stone Bridge, okay?"

  "But all the kids talk like that, Erin, it's no big deal."

  Bowie said, "Georgie, if you talk like that, everyone will think I'm a lousy parent."

  Georgie's lower lip fell.

  "All the kids, Georgie?" Sherlock asked. "Surely not. Sean doesn't, nor do his friends." She crossed her fingers. He was two years younger.

  Georgie nodded vigorously.

  Bowie said quietly, "Georgie Loyola Richards, you will not say bad words," and he looked at her straight on, in silence.

  Georgie took a big bite of her taco and chewed hard.

  "Her middle name is Loyola?" Sherlock grinned at the little girl. "I like it."

  "It's was for her grandfather, Sean O'Grady, and yes, he graduated from Loyola, valedictorian of his class. Story goes he downed six shots of Irish whiskey and passed out in a closet."

  Erin said, "I remember when I was Georgie's age, there was a Mr. O'Grady-he lived one street over-but he was a gambler and a bad one. He had what my dad called negative luck. He pawned his wife's wedding ring and the poor woman thought she'd lost it. She hired me to find it and I tracked down the pawn stub in Mr. O'Grady's dresser drawer. Mrs. O'Gr
ady didn't speak to him for months, as I recall."

  Everyone laughed, and the tension disappeared.

  Sherlock started telling them about the case in Washington, D.C.

  Georgie, all ears, ate three tacos.

  32

  It was Sherlock who tucked Georgie in that evening and read her the next chapter of her Nancy Drew mystery. Erin and Bowie cleaned up the dishes in Erin's small kitchen.

  Erin cupped her hand to her ear.

  "What?" Bowie asked.

  "I can't seem to hear Sherlock reading to Georgie. And her bedroom is only one crappy-thin poorly constructed wall away."

  Bowie vigorously dried a cup. "Sorry about that, but you know it's usually true."

  "Yeah, yeah, I know. You're off the hook." She tossed him a dry dish towel.

  Bowie stared at a wet glass. "Sherlock was out of line to take you to see Jane Ann Royal."

  She grinned at him. "Is that snark I hear? Why would you care if Sherlock took me along?"

  "You're not FBI, Erin. You're a civilian. She shouldn't have taken you anywhere related to the investigation, and this interview was official."

  Erin threw a handful of soapy water at him.

  "Hey!" He wiped off his face and frowned at her.

  "Sorry, but you deserved that, Bowie Richards. I'm good, and you're supposed to have the brains to know to use good people whenever you can. You and your precious FBI-like Agent Cliff got all that much information out of Andreas Kesselring?"

  How did she know about that? He had no smart reply ready. Because he wasn't stupid, Bowie shut up. He dried another glass. "I was with Agent Kesselring most of the day."

  "If I tell you about our meeting with Mrs. Royal, will you tell me about what you and Agent Kesselring did?"

  He dried two plates before agreeing.

  After Erin told him her impressions of Jane Ann Royal and what the woman had said, with many questions thrown in by Bowie along the way, he nodded. "So both you and Sherlock think she knows quite a bit about what her husband's doing, and she's just playing dumb. Sort of like Madoff's wife did a couple of years back?"

  "I don't know how much Jane Ann actually knows, but I'll tell you, she puts on a good act, all straightforward and open, but she knows more than she lets on. And Sherlock, the consummate professional, agrees with me."

  "All right, all right, I'll drop that if you will. The tennis pro, did you speak to him?"

  "No, he just waved and left. Mrs. Royal said she hadn't decided to sleep with him yet. Evidently he wouldn't be the first tennis instructor she's bedded. She likes them young and hard. She said her husband prefers women nearer to his own age, like Carla Alvarez. An interesting reversal. I wonder if she's right. His name is Mick Haggarty and he really wants to be an actor. If what she says is true, he may not know much."

  "Neither you nor Sherlock trust her, either. We'll see. I'll check out the tennis pro."

  "Mick Haggarty. He's a tennis pro at the Glenis Springs Country Club right down the road."

  Bowie nodded, put another glass in the cupboard. He was building a military-straight line of glasses.

  She said, "Georgie was telling me about your long commute, how you get home tired a lot of nights. She said you were thinking about leaving Stone Bridge and moving to New Haven."

  "The commute's not all that bad, really, but she's right, I am thinking about putting my house up for sale." He paused, frowned. "I don't know how she knew that."

  "The kid's precocious, reads people, particularly you, very well, and she's a great eavesdropper. Actually, now that I remember back, I started early as well. I was a champ by Georgie's age. No one said anything I didn't pay attention to."

  "That's what's in my future? Whispering whenever I'm in the house? Maybe it was a mistake to settle here in the first place, but given the current market, I may not have a lot of choice. Thing is, Georgie's school was highly recommended by a friend of mine in L.A., and that's what locked me on target. Georgie really likes her school, likes the kids, sure likes her dance class and teacher."

  "Tough decision." Erin wiped her hands on a dish towel, found herself twisting it over and over. "Well, maybe it's not all that great a distance. I made it up to New Haven today to see my client, did it in under fifty minutes."

  "What client?"

  Big mouth, big mouth. Didn't matter. Who cared? "He's a professor at Yale, an old friend of my dad's. We ate in the Berkeley dining room, his college when he went there thirty years ago. Quite a place."

  "What are you doing for him?"

  Shut up, shut up. "Confidential, Agent Richards. Pull out my fingernails, you still can't make me talk. Tell me about Kesselring."

  Why doesn't she want to tell me? He said, "Kesselring wanted to see Blauvelt's body today and that was when I decided to deal with him myself. I called Dr. Ella Franks and she met us at our local morgue, in the basement in the Stone Bridge Memorial Hospital. I have to admit he asked her good questions, and he said right off he didn't believe the killer obliterated his face to prevent identification. We've all been wondering about that."

  Bowie thought back to the cold sterile room, standing across the autopsy table from Blauvelt's body. Bowie had watched Kesselring carefully as he stared down at Blauvelt's ruined face. "Dr. Franks, you said the killer struck a half-dozen blows to his face?"

  Dr. Franks nodded. "Yes, exactly half a dozen, like his killer counted the hits. It was postmortem. Why do you think the murderer did this to him?"

  Kesselring never looked away from Blauvelt's face. He said with complete certainty, "Rage, psychotic rage. Someone was really over the edge, so wound up he just didn't stop. He wanted to-how do you say it-erase the man, yes, that's it, the killer wanted to erase him, and he did."

  And Bowie had said to him, "If the killer didn't care about his being quickly identified, then why did he cut off Blauvelt's fingers? Why not cut off his feet?"

  Kesselring was silent a moment, chewing this over, and admitted it was strange. "Perhaps the psychotic rage had burned itself out, perhaps the killer heard someone coming. Perhaps he planned to come back and bury Blauvelt, but he was prevented from doing so."

  All of that made sense, Bowie thought, and cursed under his breath.

  Bowie had noticed that Dr. Franks, who admired him, dammit, respected what he said, was looking at Kesselring with something of the same expression he'd seen on Dolores Cliff's face. It burned his gut.

  Bowie shook his head at the memory of his own conceit. He said to Erin, "Then Kesselring asked to visit the Schiffer Hartwin offices. The lawyers were camped out there. Caskie Royal refused to see us, sent us a message to talk to his lawyers. Kesselring and I met briefly with Bender the Elder. He was cordial to Kesselring, but of course offered no help at all.

  "Then Kesselring wanted to speak to Carla Alvarez. We were both surprised when she agreed to see us, but then she simply smiled at us, and said she had no comment on the advice of their legal staff. And she didn't budge. I think she saw us just to rub our noses in it."

  Erin asked, "What about the guy who's manager of accounting, Turley Drexel?"

  "What do you know about Turley Drexel?"

  "Didn't Sherlock tell you? She said when she walked into Alvarez's office the morning Blauvelt's body was discovered, she interrupted Alvarez and Turley Drexel in a loud and nasty argument. She didn't know what it was about, but could there be something there?"

  "I'll check on that." He ran his fingers through his dark hair, making it stand on end. "This is precisely why there should be only one team working a case. This could be important, yet I didn't know about it."

  "It's called debriefing, Bowie. I'll bet you haven't told Sherlock all about Kesselring yet, have you?"

  "That's beside the point, I-well, smack me in the head. Okay, you're right. And you can st
op that now."

  "Stop what?" He was standing two feet away from her, staring at her hard.

  "Stop being such a smart-mouth, even if you're right. It burns me."

  Erin gave him a fat smile. Without thinking, she took a single step toward him, leaned up, and kissed him, fast and light and easy, and stepped back. She laughed. "Suck it up, Agent Richards," and she snapped his thigh with the towel.

  "Georgie's almost asleep," Sherlock said from the kitchen doorway. "Since the walls are so thin in apartments, you know, I heard most of what you guys talked about." She raised an eyebrow, looked from one to the other. "Interesting."

  "What's interesting?" Bowie asked, lips seamed.

  "What you said about Kesselring. Where's he at this evening?"

  "He's dining at Chez Pierre. He wanted to see where Blauvelt had his last meal. He wanted to speak to Estafan, see if he could find other witnesses. I wonder what the owner Paul Remier thinks of him."

  Sherlock frowned. "Seems like a waste of time to me. He could read the reports, they're very thorough. Why is he rewalking in all our steps?"

  "Maybe he doesn't think the FBI is thorough enough," Erin said. "Or more likely, he thinks you're holding out on him."

  Bowie looked thoughtful. "Or maybe Kesselring knows more than he's told us and wants to see if anyone else does too."

  33

  STONE BRIDGE, CONNECTICUT

  Thursday morning

  Why hadn't Dr. Kender called? Surely he'd had plenty of time to think things through. Erin looked over at her fireplace, at the two loose bricks she'd dug out to stash a copy of Caskie Royal's papers. She'd awakened that morning feeling urgent, wanting to get something rolling or-or what? She didn't know, but she felt restless and unfocused. She felt something bad was coming, and it was driving her nuts.

  Fifteen minutes later, Erin gave up and dialed Dr. Kender's number. She got his voice mail. She checked the schedule he'd given her, and sure enough, he was teaching a graduate class on Ahmose I, first ruler in the Eighteenth Dynasty, who finished the campaign to expel the Hyksos rulers from Egypt, something she knew since she'd read the course syllabus. If he didn't call her by noon, she'd try again. She was anxious to talk over taking the next step, releasing the papers, come what may. What was holding him up?