Second Life (Will Finch Mystery Thriller Series Book 4)

by D. F. Bailey

  He draped the Armani jacket over the chair beside him and then sat down beside Lou who was already engaged in conversation. Lou nervously tapped the edges of the agents’ business cards against the wood surface of the table, a distraction that made Finch wonder what they might have discussed before he entered the boardroom.

  The two agents introduced themselves, shook his hand and passed him their business cards. Lorna Munn held up a palm-size recorder so everyone could see that she was recording the interview.

  “For the record, the tape is just to help us keep the facts straight. At this time no one here is under investigation. All right?”

  She paused so Lou and Will could absorb the rules at play. When they nodded, she continued.

  “Okay. Time is critical here, so I suggest we get down to it.” Munn tipped her chin toward the chair beside Finch. “That’s the jacket?”

  “As requested.” Finch smiled, an effort to show that he’d complied with the first item on their list of demands.

  Munn tugged on a pair of gloves, crossed the room behind the table and lifted the jacket in her hands. She held it up to the light and examined it for a moment, then carried it back to Detective Elphick who gave it a cursory glance. She then slipped the jacket into a laundromat-sized evidence bag, draped it over the end of the table and removed her gloves.

  As she handled the jacket and evidence bag, Elphick leaned forward.

  “A lot of people like to think the more the merrier,” he said, “but when it comes to evidence, less is always more. Especially with fingerprints and DNA. So … who else has touched it?” He spoke with a flat midwestern accent. From his natty attire, Finch assumed he was from Chicago. Likely the North Side.

  “A woman named Alice—last name unknown—who gave it to me in the Hyde-Turk Mini Park, then me and Eve Noon,” Finch said. He decided to omit Toby Squire, at least for now. The conversation would swing around to him soon enough.

  “Noon. Ex-SFPD?” Elphick asked with a frown.

  Finch studied him a moment. Almost four years after her dismissal from the city police force Eve still bore the reputation of a saint—or pariah—depending on your point of view. Apparently her renown had spread to the FBI.

  “Yes.”

  “Then we’ll need both your prints,” he said.

  “I think you’ve got mine on file. And she’s already registered with the locals.” Finch put on an amused look. Obviously Elphick hadn’t performed a background check before he took on this assignment.

  “Yeah, we do.” Munn shot Elphick a look. “From last year. Senator Whitelaw’s suicide.”

  Elphick muttered something to himself and glanced away.

  “So you found a list,” Munn continued.

  “Yes.” Lou Levine pointed to the sheet of paper in front of him. “We sent it to you soon after it came to light.”

  “So who else knows about it?” she asked.

  “The four of us plus some staff. Fiona Page, Wally Gimbel and Gabe Finkleman,” Finch said as he pointed through the interior window to his colleagues working in the bog. “And Eve Noon.”

  “And that’s it?”

  Finch nodded. “By the way, I see the Twitter page has come down. Can we assume the Bureau pulled it?”

  “Let’s stay focused on one thing at a time.” Agent Munn drew herself up in the chair, a movement to establish her dominance in the proceedings. “Now from the beginning, Mr. Finch. Take us down memory lane on this one.” She fixed a thin smile on her lips and rotated a finger above the table surface, a gesture that said, get on with it.

  Will had prepared for a grilling, and he led the investigators through the sequence of events as he knew them. When he revealed that Raymond Guzman served as Toby Squire’s accomplice, he felt a pang of guilt. But he recalled that his only pledge to Guzman was to withhold his name for a single day. Perhaps by now Guzman had fled the country and taken up residence in a seaside village. A room with a view.

  “Sounds like you mounted quite the investigative enterprise. You uncovered the identities of the twenty-four names. And you identified most of the players in the robbery.” Agent Elphick nodded as if he himself couldn’t have done much better.

  “Except for John Doe.” Will shook his head with a look of regret. “The man who owned the jacket. My guess is that he’s the perp who murdered Dr. Martin Fast on Market Street.”

  “How do you figure that?” Munn asked.

  “Squire used the same pistol to shoot himself. He stole the gun along with a wad of cash from John Doe’s Armani suit jacket. But when Martin Fast was killed, Squire and Guzman were two blocks away in City Hall, setting up their next mugging.” In fact, Finch couldn’t be sure of the timing sequence at all. But by stating this with such certainty, he was making a play that he hoped would draw out some unknown details from his interrogators.

  A moment of silence settled on the room as everyone considered the possibilities.

  “Could be,” Elphick mused. “When you look at the CCTV footage from City Hall gallery. You have the timing just about right.”

  Finch nodded his head in silence. He recalled scanning the ceiling of the men’s room for cameras. While he’d seen nothing obvious, at the time it didn’t occur to him that Squire’s victim might have been recorded on a camera outside the door.

  Munn coughed into her hand and continued. “Now I understand that you called a Ms. Jayne Waterston in New York City today.”

  Finch felt a ripple of surprise. Had the FBI tapped into his calls?

  “Yeah, first thing this morning.”

  “Have you spoken to her before?”

  “No. What’s this about?”

  “Let me ask the questions. It works better that way.” Munn put on a faint smile. “How do you know her?”

  “By reputation only. She’s a colleague. Specializes in climate change journalism. Plus, she’s on the list.” Finch rolled his head toward the printed paper on the table in front of Lou. “Number eight.”

  “What did you discuss?”

  Finch studied the wall for a moment. Where was this going?

  “We talked about collaborating on a story. About Kali Rood.”

  “Who’s she?” Munn asked.

  “The head of a private foundation. Headquarters in New York City, with a training center in Ashland Oregon, outreach offices in the UK, Europe, Asia. It registers over fourteen thousand dues-paying members, each of them who hand over a thousand dollars a year for the privilege. Do the math. Every year she becomes a multimillionaire all over again.” Finch shrugged knowing the information was readily at hand. “You can read my profile of her in the eXpress. Or Jayne Waterston’s article in The Village Voice. That’s where Kali Rood was dubbed the Virgin Queen.”

  “Waterston called her that?”

  “Yeah.”

  Elphick leaned in again. “And did Waterston agree to collaborate with you?”

  “Not yet. She wants a day to consider it.”

  “What else?” Elphick asked.

  “What do you mean, what else?”

  “Did you tell her she was on the list?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did she react?”

  “She said she’d been threatened before.” Finch shrugged. “Look, what’s this all about? Anyone working in this business longer than a year has been threatened.”

  “Does she know who else is on the list?” Munn asked.

  “Yes.”

  She leaned forward. “You sent it to her?”

  Finch paused to consider their line of interrogation. The questions were penning him into a box. He sensed that a trap lay just ahead.

  “Previously you said the only people who’d seen the list worked for the eXpress. Now you’re telling us Waterston has it,” Elphick said. “Which is it?”

  Lou raised a hand to take a moment to whisper into Will’s ear. “Be careful. It’s a criminal offense to lie to the FBI.”

  “Sorry,” Will said. “Look, I’ll be honest, I’m pre
tty shaken by all this. I simply forgot to mention her.”

  “And you sent the names to her. How?” Elphick’s voice rose with a tone of disbelief. “By email?”

  Finch nodded and realized he’d now made two mistakes. Forwarding an unencrypted message to Jayne Waterston was akin to sending a postcard through the mail. Anyone could read it as it passed from hand to hand. Nothing he could do about that now.

  Elphick glanced at Munn, a look to encourage her to continue the interrogation.

  “And are you planning to call the other names on this list?”

  “Once Lou says so.” Finch crooked a thumb to Lou Levine hoping to deflect their attention to the lawyer.

  Lou smiled at Finch. “And effective right now, I’m giving that a green light.”

  “Good. Then I’ve got a job to do.” Finch made a move to stand up, but Munn waved him back into his chair.

  “Not so fast. We want to contact them first.” She narrowed her eyes and stared at Lou.

  “Sorry, we’ve got First Amendment rights,” Lou said in a rising voice, “and a duty to inform the public of a present danger.”

  “We’d like you to give us one more day,” Munn said. “Then it’s your story.”

  Finch sensed an opportunity. Now he leaned toward Munn. “One day? In exchange for what?”

  Again the agents traded a look. Elphick nodded to her, a gesture of approval. Finch guessed that they’d prepared an offer before the meeting got underway.

  “Possibly in exchange for exclusive information.” Munn replied in an even, measured voice. “And I emphasize the word possibly.”

  “What information?”

  “About Jayne Waterston.” Munn paused and then added, “Do we have a deal?”

  “You know something about her that I can use to move this story forward?”

  “Definitely. But you have to agree to not publish the list for twenty-four hours.”

  Finch glanced at Lou. He blinked, yes.

  “All right, deal. So give.”

  Munn glanced at Elphick again.

  “Jayne Waterston was murdered early this afternoon,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Less than two hours ago.” Elphick checked his watch. “A little after eleven o’clock our time.”

  “My God.” Will struggled to respond. He’d spoken to her just this morning. Stick to the basics, he told himself. Focus. “How did she die?”

  Munn shrugged and shook her head with a bleak expression that suggested the situation was more dire than anyone imagined.

  “We’re waiting on the ME report,” she said. “But it looks like poison of some kind. She collapsed in a Manhattan coffee shop called Klutch. By the time an ambulance got her to a hospital, she was gone.”

  ※

  Will left the boardroom, walked through the bog to his cubicle and grabbed his courier bag from the footwell of his desk. On his way to the reception area he found Fiona and told her he had an urgent meeting and that he’d file a story on Jayne Waterston’s murder before midnight.

  “What?” she asked in a plaintive voice.

  “Talk to Lou Levine.”

  He waved a hand back toward the boardroom and jogged along the hallway to the staircase exit. He clambered down the steps two at a time until he reached the building entrance on Mission Street. From there he strode up to the BART station on Market Street. Thirty minutes later he arrived at San Francisco International Airport. After a quick reconnaissance he discovered that United and Jet Blue still had unsold seats in their economy sections. He bought a window seat on Blue and made his way to their departure gate. While he waited to board he searched for breaking news about Waterston’s murder on his laptop. A stroke of luck: so far no one had broken the story. Munn had given him an exclusive.

  He opened a new file and began to type the first sentence that came to mind: Jayne Waterston was pronounced dead on arrival after she was transported by ambulance to a local hospital from Klutch, a Manhattan cafe where authorities claim she may have been poisoned. The FBI is investigating her death in relation to a series of recent murders of climate change scientists and media advocates.

  Finch glanced at the time and realized he had twenty minutes before his plane would load. He knew he couldn’t finish the story without any background research. Nonetheless, he plowed ahead and every time he needed to insert a fact or identify a source he wrote X-check this-X. Most of what he wrote was based on the conversation he’d had with Waterston that morning. Because of their interview, she knew about the list, and most of the players on it. He included a short bio of her and identified her as a leading reporter in the field of green science and politics. By the time the Jet Blue desk announced his boarding call, he’d written six paragraphs—just enough for the eXpress to claim a stake in breaking the story. He closed the file and emailed it to Fiona with a note: Breaking fast. Get one of the team to lock in the facts wherever I’ve left a hole. Will check in from NYC.

  As he boarded the plane he called Eve. No answer. As he began to leave a message for her, his voice faltered. It was the first moment in the past two hours that he’d had a chance to reflect on what he was about to do.

  “It’s me. I’ll call you from New York when I get a break. Check with Fiona, she knows what’s going down. And look … Eve.” He paused, unsure how to continue. “That was really something last night. I just want you to know that it wasn’t a joke. I meant what I said. You know … that I love you.”

  As he buckled the seatbelt over his lap, he shook his head with disbelief at his own hesitation. His fecklessness. How could he fail to express his feelings for her for so damned long? She’d waited to hear his pledge for more than a year. There’s something wrong about that, he told himself. Something wrong about you.

  ※ — THIRTEEN — ※

  SIMON WATERSTON STOOD in the living room of his sister’s apartment and tried to make sense of Jayne’s sudden death. He checked the clock. Five-thirty-two AM. The weariness accumulated from the long day dragged through his bones. He considered stretching out in Jayne’s bed, but somehow the idea seemed invasive. Incestuous.

  For a moment he stood next to the window overlooking Seventy-third Street and stared into the bleak night, then he sauntered over to the futon against the near wall and decided to try for some sleep before sunrise. He unlocked the frame hinge and folded the mattress out into a bed. He took off his shoes, shirt and pants and tucked one of the corduroy cushions under his head and closed his eyes. As he lay there, he replayed the scenes that had unravelled his world over the previous twelve hours.

  From the moment FBI Agent John Vickers appeared at Simon’s door in the DA’s office he felt as if he’d been swept into a whirlwind. Vickers had been efficiently sympathetic—a chilling combination as it turned out—and escorted him to Lennox Hill Hospital to identify Jayne’s corpse. The attending physician explained that while the cause of death appeared to be a very potent poison, the medical examiner’s report would soon clarify a cause of death. “Likely within twenty-four hours,” he’d said as he glanced at Jayne’s medical chart. “Thirty-six at the latest.”

  After Simon absorbed the shock of her death and murmured a few parting words at her side, Vickers advised Simon that a crime scene team had confiscated her cell phone, laptop, notebook and purse from the table where she’d sat at Klutch.

  “They’ll process everything they find,” Vickers had said. His voice was confident. Reassuring. “With any luck that should toss up some leads we can pursue.”

  After they left the hospital, Vickers escorted Simon to Jayne’s apartment so that he could answer questions from the detective working with the forensics unit. Vickers introduced Simon to FBI Agent Calinda Cruz, a black woman in her early fifties with a face etched by worry lines that extended from her forehead to her chin. Her body was lean but sturdy and Simon knew she was a force to be reckoned with. The three of them sat at the small table that served as Jayne’s home-office.

  “First let me
express my condolences, Mr. Waterston.” A practiced expression of sorrow fell over Calinda Cruz’s face. She paused as if she wanted to give him a moment to embrace her empathy. She saw his face soften and continued.

  “I understand you work in the Manhattan DA’s office.”

  He nodded. “The Cybercrime and Identity Theft Bureau. I’ve been there just under a year.”

  “Then you know how this goes. We’ve got a lot of questions—but not much time if we’re going to find whoever killed your sister.”

  He blinked and glanced a way.

  “Did you see her often?”

  “I guess.” He shrugged as if he couldn’t come up with an accurate answer. “We saw each other maybe once a month. Called a little more often, maybe once a week. Sometimes less.”

  “What about your parents? Other siblings?”

  “They died ten years ago. No other sibs.” His voice faltered. He drew a long breath and pressed on. “It was just the two of us. She was my twin.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cruz paused to reflect on this. “What about you. Are you married? Have a partner?”

  He shook his head.

  Calinda Cruz glanced at Vickers and nodded. The glance suggested they’d seen this sort of loneliness before and understood the isolation that would soon overwhelm the man sitting next to them.

  “Did Jayne have any enemies you know of?”

  He considered the possibilities and shrugged. “No.”

  “Jealous boyfriends? Someone who might want revenge?”

  “None of them seemed to last that long.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Girlfriends?”

  “Maybe.” He tipped his head to acknowledge the possibility. He’d never liked her choice of romantic partners, so they— or rather, he—chose not discuss it.

  “Mr. Waterston, the forensics team discovered some drugs above one of the kitchen cabinets.” Cruz pointed a finger in the direction of the kitchen.

  He frowned and looked away. No surprise. “All right. So what kind of drugs? Pot?”