by Dee Brice
“Again, all you have is a theory.”
“Your Paris pied a terre is a handsome place, Reynard. It cost a fortune, much more that an Interpol agent—even one who has served as long as you—can afford without an outside income source. The Paris police found the forged passport in your gun safe. The passport you used to access the safe deposit box as Charles Cartierri.”
Fox snorted. “Next you’ll accuse me of murdering Esmé Cartierri.”
“No, Charles Cartierri murdered his wife. We have DNA evidence to prove it.”
“And me? What evidence besides this convenient discovery of an obviously planted passport do you have against me?”
“Opportunity. You did sign in on Thursday as Cartierri. Handwriting experts will testify to that. The murder weapon? I doubt we will ever find the garrote. You are far too clever to keep it. And it is easily disassembled and tossed away. As to motive… How did you put it? Oh yes, at Eton he treated you like shit.”
“Nobody holds a grudge that long, Hunter.” Fox sneered.
“Perhaps not, but the chance to split the insurance money two ways instead of three? When you confronted Cartierri later, you planted the bank manager’s key in his suit coat pocket, knowing that would point to him as the Paris murderer. You gambled, knowing the Paris police would believe a respected Interpol agent over a civilian. Especially a pompous prick like Charles Cartierri. No doubt you banked on him accusing Tiffany, which would further deflect suspicion away from you. With all their finger pointing at each other, Tiffany would probably tell law enforcement about the thefts Charles forced her to commit. Charles denying any involvement while implicating not only Tiffany but James Foster’s dead stepson. A veritable circus with everyone performing to the ringmaster’s whip. Your whip.”
“Not that I’m admitting anything but—”
“Of course not.”
“What makes you think I had anything to do with any of this?”
“Other than your forged passport?” Reynard glared. “I would not have thought anything about Charles inspecting the Belt on Thursday, even though he lied about his whereabouts. But you failed to tell me TC Carter’s real name is Tiffany Cartierri. I had to wonder why you lied. But that lie was part of your agreement with Charles. You would do nothing to set Interpol on his tail. But you got greedy and saw the opportunity to get even richer. One-hundred-fifty million pounds—even after taxes—would tempt all the saints in heaven. Especially since you had enough evidence of Emilio Santana’s complicity in insurance fraud to blackmail him into sharing.” Standing, Damian added, “Colonel Mendez will escort you back to Bogotá. Nick will accompany you to Paris.”
Fox gathered up his raincoat. “Fucker. You won’t get out this with your reputation intact. When Lyons learns you fucked your primary suspect, your name will be shit as well.”
It gave Damian a sense of satisfaction that Fox had treated him, threatened him as if he were his brother Michael. His satisfaction grew as he said, “Lyons already knows, Reynard.” The door opened, revealing Colonel Mendez and Nick Troy. “Have a pleasant trip home.”
Chapter Nineteen
The dream began as it always did. The dark house. The eerie, waiting silence. The curse, the sudden flare of light.
Charles lifted her mother’s body, then carried it out the open French doors, across the dew-damp lawn, to the site where the gazebo-spa would stand. Like dumping a sack of rotten potatoes, Charles tipped her mother’s body into the hole above an abandoned well.
Returning to the house, Charles shredded her mother’s clothes, collected the bottles of exotic perfumes and expensive cosmetics, dumped shoes, coats, hats into suitcases and garbage bags. All the while he alternately shrieked and muttered.
TC could hear the shrieks.
“Whore, you’ll never leave me now.”
The words made no sense to the child she’d been that night, but the woman she’d become understood everything. Her mother hadn’t deserted her. Charles Cartierri had murdered his wife and buried every trace of her in the abandoned well.
Tiffany opened her eyes, surprised they weren’t filled with tears. She felt utterly calm, completely free of guilt for the first time in more than twenty years.
An arduous task lay before her, but she felt equal to it. If Damian wouldn’t or couldn’t help her, her papa would. She’d talk to Hunter first, spare her father—for a time at least—the pain of knowing how his lover had died. Damian had indicated the evidence against Charles Cartierri in the Banque de Medellin murders was even more circumstantial than what Interpol had on her, but the case against him in Esmé’s death was solid. Add to it a twenty-three-year-old murder and Charles Cartierri would spend the rest of his life behind colorless prison walls.
* * * * *
“I need to talk to you.”
Damian looked up from the latest e-mails from Interpol, Lyons. Seeing Tiffany in the doorway to Emilio Santana’s study, he mentally held his breath. He suspected she had come to rail at him for his betrayal of her, but he would not quibble over details. That she would talk to him at all was a miracle.
“Come in. Sit.”
She sidled into the room and his heart clenched at her diffidence, at her obvious uncertainty of her welcome. In her hands she carried a pair of wraparound sunglasses, more, he suspected, to hide her eyes than to shield them from the early morning sun’s glare. Rimmed by pale purple bruises, her eyes were gray-green and full of shadows. She had scraped her luxuriant hair back from her face into a severe bun, emphasizing her high, sculpted cheekbones and the resoluteness of her chin. Dressed in unrelieved black, she looked like a woman in mourning. Moving as if every bone and muscle in her body ached, she sank into a chair and gazed out the windows behind his shoulders. Damian sensed she was unaware of the majestic mountains outside, of the cheery fire that took the morning chill from the room.
“Would you like some coffee?” he asked when she finally looked at him.
“No, thank you.” She stood abruptly and headed for the door, her stride determined. “I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry for disturbing you. This doesn’t concern you.”
“Everything about you concerns me,” he said softly.
Her hand on the doorknob, she half turned toward him. “Am I still a suspect?”
“Of course not.” Feeling as if he was picking his way through a minefield, he crossed the room, but stopped at the perimeter of her personal space. With Herculean effort, Damian resisted touching her. “I would like to help you, if I can.”
Her gaze heated and darted to his face. “Easing your conscience, Agent Hunter?”
“Probably.” Gesturing toward the chair she had vacated, refraining from clarifying his non-agent status, he said, “Please, tell me what I can do.”
She stared at her hands, at the fingers she had clenched around her sunglasses until her knuckles turned white. At last, just when he thought she would sweep from the room without saying another word, she sighed and lifted her haunted gaze to his.
“I want you to help me bury my mother.”
With infinite tenderness he took her hand and led her to the chair.
It took nearly an hour—an hour of long silences while she tried to quell her shaking, interspersed with torrents of words—to get the story from her. When she finished, Damian telephoned his brother’s former superior at Interpol.
When he hung up, Tiffany lifted her head and looked at him expectantly. “Well?”
Having gotten the runaround from Michael’s chief, whom Damian had awakened at three in the morning, he chose his words carefully. “Domestic violence is out of Interpol’s—”
“This is murder!” Tiffany protested an instant before she bounded out of the chair and stormed toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Damian demanded, grabbing her elbow and spinning her into his arms. Remembering her threat to emasculate him if he manhandled her again, he goose-stepped her to the wall. Using his body, he immobilized her.
“I
’m going home. Nobody—not Interpol, not even Charles Cartierri’s high-priced lawyers—can prevent my digging in my own backyard.”
“You cannot leave Colombia,” he reminded her smugly and watched the fight drain out of her. “Besides, as usual, you did not let me finish.”
“So finish already,” she griped, her voice dripping acid.
“Interpol ordinarily does not involve itself in domestic affairs. In this case, however, my contact will make an exception and contact the National Central Bureau in your country.”
“How kind of your contact to bother.” She shoved futilely at his shoulders.
Backing off a half step, he said, “Yes, well… It may take some time to get the necessary warrants.”
“Damn it, I’m not going to sit here twiddling my thumbs while Charles Cartierri’s shysters pervert the law and get him off scot-free.”
“You will not have to twiddle your thumbs. I intend to keep you very busy right here.”
Her eyes blazing with suspicion, she glared up at him. “Oh yeah? What, exactly, do you have in mind, Agent Hunter?”
Smirking, pleased by the prospect of spending time with her despite her wishes to the contrary, he said, “Depositions, Tiffany darling. Depositions.”
* * * * *
The following morning, they convened in Emilio’s office.
“Do you dream often, Señorita Cartierri?” Diego Sanchez asked in an oily voice that made Damian want to flatten the lawyer’s nose into his teeth.
“As often as the next person, I suppose.”
“Nightly?”
“I guess. Yes,” she amended when Cartierri’s representative focused his assessing gaze on her.
“And do you always remember what you dream?”
“‘Always’, Señor Sanchez?” Tiffany asked with matching casualness. “Dreams being what they are, I doubt anyone can say without equivocation that they always remember every dream.”
“So, you are saying you do not remember what you dream.”
“I’m saying that I don’t know if I always remember every dream. I’m saying that my memory of what your client did to my mother returned to me in a dream.”
“Do you dream in color?”
“Sometimes. Almost always.”
“And do you sometimes have erotic dreams?”
“What has that to do with anything?” Damian demanded, exploding out of his chair, his hands clenched into fists. He had had enough of this bastard’s innuendoes. Now he was going to knock the lawyer’s teeth to Hades and back.
Diego Sanchez turned a pleading, injured expression toward the Interpol mediator and said, “I am only trying to determine Señorita Cartierri’s mental state at the time of this convenient return of memory.”
“You are implying, Señor Sanchez,” Sir James Foster said into the brief silence, “that my daughter is a liar.”
“An allegation easily disproved by exhuming my mother’s body.” Tiffany sounded calm, but righteous fury built in her eyes.
“The fabrication of an overwrought if not malicious mind,” Sanchez said in a fulminating voice.
The mediator, a wizened, sharp-eyed man on loan from Interpol’s Colombian National Central Bureau, steepled his fingers and considered each of the assembled players with an unwavering gaze. “I agree with Ms. Cartierri,” he said at last, favoring Tiffany with an avuncular smile.
After a quick answering grin, Tiffany turned to Colonel Mendez and asked, “Now may I go home?”
“No, Señorita Cartierri, you may not.”
Her mouth gaping, Tiffany glared at the Colombian policeman. Spinning on her heel, she stormed out of Emilio Santana’s study and slammed the door behind her.
Only the rattling windows voiced a protest.
* * * * *
For a week the entire Santana household tiptoed around Tiffany. She realized her mood swings bordered on manic-depression. She tried her hardest to show her confident side instead of the part of her that brooded on Diego Sanchez’s allegations. Had her mind, overloaded with everything that had happened to her in a few short weeks, sought vengeance against an innocent man? Or had she, in fact, remembered and dreamed the truth?
Damian also found the waiting for news from the States interminable. More than anything in the world, he wanted to take Tiffany in his arms, dry her tears, tears she had yet to shed, and love away her sorrow. Even the news that the Long Island police had found her mother’s remains had failed to dispel her moroseness. It was as if Tiffany thought herself guiltier than Charles Cartierri was in the murders of her mother and Esmé Cartierri.
Esmeralda and James united against Damian, each urging patience and time. Damian tried to heed their advice, but he knew time worked against him. Every minute of every day, he could feel Tiffany slipping farther and farther away, withdrawing deeper into herself until Damian feared no one would be able to reach her.
Should he have revealed who really had solved the case? he wondered while he watched Tiffany sleep in the early spring sun beside the Santanas’ swimming pool. Would the accolades she so richly deserved have prevented her slipping into lethargy? He did not believe they would. For too many years she had endured having her life revealed to total strangers, read about in newspapers, speculated over by gossip columnists. She had earned the right to privacy.
What she had not earned was the right to become a non-person.
“Señorita Tiffany is very sad,” Rogelio Santana said, sitting on the chaise lounge next to Damian’s.
“You don’t look much happier, m’ijo.” And misery loves company, Damian thought, feeling a spark of hopefulness. “Why don’t you go talk to her?”
“She is sleeping.”
“She sleeps too much. Besides, she likes you. I do not think she would mind if you wakened her.”
A wide smile lit the small face. “¿Verdad?”
“Truth.” He handed his young friend Tiffany’s hat, floppy fronds around the brim rustling in the gentle breeze. With a grin of his own he watched Tiffany swat the tickling fronds away from her nose, her cheek, her lips. He saw her open her eyes and a spurt of joy welled in him when the dullness faded from those emerald depths.
“Hola, hombre,” she said in her musical contralto. “¿Que tal?”
“Not so good, TC.”
Damian left them alone.
Tiffany adjusted the back of her chaise so she could sit up, then opened her arms. Like a fledgling finding its nest, Rogelio settled against her, his narrow back resting against her chest. She wrapped her arms around him and waited.
“What mi abuelo did was not very nice.”
“No, it wasn’t very nice,” Tiffany agreed, matching Rogelio’s solemn tone.
“Does that make Grandfather a bad man?”
Does it? she wondered, for the first time in days allowing herself to think, to feel. What Emilio Santana had done was both legally and morally wrong, but did that make him a bad man? Bad, yes, but not irredeemable. Not evil, a word that found new depths of meaning in Charles Cartierri.
“I think,” she said, choosing her words with care, “your grandfather let temptation get the better of him. Which can happen to anyone. But I also think he is basically good at heart.”
She felt the small chest heave, heard the soft sigh, sensed a regret that went deeper than disappointment in his grandfather.
“I think I will not become a gemologist after all.”
“Why not, Rogelio?”
“I think I shall be a medico like mi padre instead. The temptations do not seem so great. Sometimes, Señorita TC, the stones, the emeralds, they whisper to me. ‘See how beautiful I am. How beautiful a piece you could make of me. Take me, Rogelio. Tu abuelo will not miss me’.”
“Medicine holds its own temptations, m’ijo. Drugs, for one.”
Again, her small companion sighed. “I wish Grandfather had taken me with him when he went to verify—authenticate—the Belt. Had I been there, he would not have taken it.”
“You�
��re wrong, Rogelio.” Even to her own ears her tone sounded sharper than she had intended. Softening her voice, she explained. “Your presence might have made it more difficult for him to lie, but your grandfather still would have kept the real Belt. You cannot assume responsibility for another’s actions. Each of us must do that for himself.” Besides, Emilio hadn’t stolen anything. He’d simply fashioned a substitute and kept the real Belt for himself. Fraud was a different issue.
Wondering how much she could tell Rogelio without destroying his opinion of her, Tiffany sighed. She had to risk it, for the boy’s sake.
“Not so very long ago I, too, took things that did not belong to me. No, please don’t look at me or I won’t be able to tell you.” The squirming child quieted once more, but she could feel the questions humming through his body.
“For a long time I forgave myself. I justified my actions as showing love and respect for the person I stole for. I knew it was wrong. Knew that I hurt people, but I didn’t stop. I kept stealing.”
“Were you punished?”
Thinking about what Charles Cartierri had planned for her—the most pleasant being life-imprisonment—she could say honestly, “I was.”
“Has Abuelo been punished?”
“Yes, Rogelio, I believe he has been. And I think you should wait awhile longer before you decide whether you want to be a doctor or a gemologist.” She gave the boy a fierce hug, then turned him to face her. “You see, hombre, the stones sing to me too.”
“They do?”
Joy so fierce it felt like agony surged through her. After weeks of smothering her pain while making everyone around her suffer, she knew what she wanted to do with her life. Her life. With Charles Cartierri behind bars, with her mother’s death avenged, with the strength to endure that Damian had given her, it truly was her life. And she wanted to share it with the man who had given her soul back to her.
“Oh yes, they do.”
