On Borrowed Time

by David Rosenfelt

  Lassiter had to be in the middle of this.

  When I got back from lunch, I had a voice mail from Craig Langel asking that I contact him. He was calling to update me on what he’d learned about Sean Lassiter’s recent life.

  “He’s been running a company called Biodyne for the last two years,” he said. “It’s a small start-up with private funding, the source of which could be Lassiter himself.”

  “Where is it located?”

  “Mahwah.”

  I was hoping it would be upstate New York, not this New Jersey town, and I mentioned that to Craig.

  “There have been seventy-one phone calls from Biodyne to the hospital in Ardmore in the last six weeks.”

  “You have their phone bill?” Craig’s contacts and ability to get things he shouldn’t have never ceased to amaze me.

  He laughed. “Nothing is secret, Richard. How many times have I told you that? And you of all people should know that by now.”

  “So he’s doing business in Ardmore; I knew Gates was hiding something. Has he got a new drug they’re testing up there?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll keep you posted.”

  We got off the phone and I put in a call to Lieutenant Kentris, to tell him what I learned. He wasn’t in, but called me back in twenty minutes.

  “I’ve confirmed that Lassiter has been doing business with Gates at the hospital,” I said.

  “Is that right?” he asked.

  “There were seventy-one calls back and forth between them in the last six weeks,” I said.

  “How is it you know that?”

  “I’m telephonically psychic, but you can trust me on it. Have you spoken to him yet?”

  “He’s out of town. Back next week.”

  I brought Kentris up to date on Julie’s death, and he said, “I guess that wasn’t her on the answering machine.”

  “Right.”

  “You still think Jennifer is alive?”

  I laughed a short laugh. “Thank you; your question means I’m making progress.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “Until now the question was whether she existed. Now it’s whether she’s alive.”

  “Leaps and bounds,” he said. “So what do you think?”

  “She called me. She’s alive,” I said.

  When we got off the phone I made myself a frozen dinner, then decided to call Allie. I told myself it was to see how she was doing, but that was really a secondary reason. The truth was that I missed her, and I missed having a partner in all of this to talk with.

  That realization made me embarrassed by my selfishness and changed my decision to call her. It took me twenty minutes to get over that embarrassment, realize I was acting like a high school kid, and make the call after all.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “I’ve been better,” she said, sounding distant. “There’s this big empty hole where my sister used to be.”

  “How’s your mother?”

  “Hard to tell. She’s trying to be strong for me, and I’m trying to be strong for her. We’re both full of shit … business as usual.” She changed the subject. “What’s going on there?”

  I told her what I had learned about Lassiter and his involvement with Gates at Ardmore Hospital.

  She perked up. “I knew it. Gates is neck-deep in this.”

  “In what? In making Jen disappear and then getting everyone she ever met to deny knowing her?”

  “Don’t be negative, Richard. You really are getting somewhere.”

  “You’ve mentioned that before. Any chance you can tell me where I’m getting?”

  “You’ll know when you get there. And Lassiter will be in the center of it all.”

  In an effort to avoid being negative, I changed the subject to Julie’s funeral, which was the next day. That’s me … Mr. Positive.

  “It’s just another step in the process,” she said. “My mother has had to live with the uncertainty for a long time, now she’s living with the loss. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.” I could hear the bitterness in her voice, and every bit of it was justified.

  “So are you, Allie. You have the same loss.”

  “It’s different for a parent. It’s beyond unbearable for a parent. A neighbor told her today that it’s good she finally can get closure; if my mother had a baseball bat she would have hit the poor woman over the head. Closure doesn’t exist when you lose a child.”

  “I should be there,” I said. I wanted to tell her how much I missed her, but that would only have made her feel guilty.

  “No, you have things you have to do.”

  “I know that.”

  “And just what are you going to do next?”

  I decided in the moment. “I’m going to see Lassiter.”

  I didn’t think for a second that Sean Lassiter would be willing to see me.

  There was no upside in it for him, at least none that I could see. I had tried to do follow-up interviews with him back when the first scandal broke, and he never responded. And this time I didn’t want to approach him in the traditional way, because I didn’t want to alert him to the fact that I suspected him. And since I didn’t have the slightest idea what I suspected him of, I was already at something of a disadvantage.

  Craig gave me the listed address for Lassiter’s company, which was in Mahwah. He also offered to go with me, but I declined. I didn’t consider Lassiter a physical threat, that wasn’t his style, and I instinctively thought I might get more from him if there were no witnesses to our conversation.

  What Craig neglected to tell me, possibly because he didn’t know, was that Lassiter’s business address was also his home. And based on that home, Lassiter had not exactly suffered in the years since we tangled. It was a magnificent old Colonial, the kind that George Washington would have lived in if he had higher-paying jobs than general and president.

  There was at least a five-hundred-yard circular driveway leading up to it, and there wasn’t a neighbor close enough to hear if a bomb went off in Lassiter’s living room. If I approached it, Lassiter would have plenty of time to know I was coming.

  I decided to wait down the road, from where I could not be seen. If he went into town, there was only one way for him to drive, so I felt confident that I would see him. Of course, he might be out. Or in bed with the flu. Or on vacation.

  But there was nothing else I could think of to do, so I waited. I felt stupid doing it, but the upside was that there was no one to see me. In two hours only three cars went by; this neighborhood was so exclusive that there were almost no people living in it.

  Amazingly, the fourth car that went by contained Lassiter in the driver’s seat. I did a double-take to make sure, but he never looked my way. I waited for him to drive down the road before I circled in behind him at a distance. Tailing was not exactly a specialty of mine, but on these roads it would be impossible to lose someone.

  I followed him into the center of town, where he parked in the municipal lot. I parked on the street nearby, and got out of my car when he left the parking lot on foot. He never looked around, and acted as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  And the son of a bitch probably didn’t.

  I needed to decide when to approach him, a decision made more difficult by the fact that I didn’t know where he was going or how long he’d be there. His first stop was a bank, which I didn’t think was the right place to make my move. I looked inside and saw that he was using the cash machine, and within three minutes he was back outside.

  Next was a men’s clothing store, and he was inside for almost a half hour. After twenty minutes, I regretted not going in, but still waited outside. My tailing skills definitely needed some work.

  His next stop was an Italian restaurant, and I looked through the window as he stopped at the reception desk and then was led to a table. The table was large enough for four, but I had no way of knowing if anyone else was coming. Except me.

  I was nervous abo
ut walking in. It was certainly not that I was afraid of Lassiter, it was more that I had no idea what I was doing and was afraid to do something that I would later regret. But if Lassiter was actually somehow a link to Jen, doing nothing was not an option.

  I walked to the desk and said, “I’m meeting Mr. Lassiter.”

  I heard him say, “Very good, sir,” but I didn’t stop to chat with him. Instead, I just walked straight to Lassiter’s table and sat down before he even realized that I was there.

  I had to hand it to the guy; he seemed no more surprised to see me than if I had been a waiter there to tell him the specials. “Well, this is unexpected,” he said.

  “Is that right?”

  “Of course, though it gives me an opportunity to thank you. You’ve been a source of much amusement for me with your recent magazine articles and your obvious mental deterioration.”

  “I’m about to be a source of aggravation for you.”

  “Those days are behind us,” he said. “Now, it’s been a real treat seeing you again, but it’s time for you to go.”

  “I’ve got investigators going through your life,” I said. “You’re connected to Jen’s disappearance, and I’m going to prove it. And then I’m going to put you away.”

  “Ah, your nonexistent girlfriend. Perhaps you also think I murdered Santa Claus?”

  I nodded. “And you buried his body at Ardmore General.”

  For the first time, I saw a flash of concern on Lassiter’s face, even though it was quickly erased. I thought I had gotten through to him; there was something about Ardmore General Hospital that worried him.

  “Good-bye, Kilmer.”

  “And it’s not just me, Lassiter. I’m working with a cop who’s after you and Gates; it’s only a matter of time.”

  He picked up his menu and looked at it, a not-so-subtle way of telling me that I was dismissed.

  “It’s only a matter of time,” I repeated, and left. The drama of my last line and departure was diminished somewhat by the fact that I didn’t exactly throw down my napkin and storm out. Instead, I stopped a waiter and asked where the restroom was.

  It was in the back of the restaurant, and after finishing up, I saw that there was an exit back there. I used it, both because it was convenient and because it meant I wouldn’t have to see Lassiter again. I’d had as much of him as I could stand for one day.

  Of course, I had to walk around the block to get to my car, which was near the front of the restaurant. I did so, and as I turned the corner, I saw a car that looked very much like the one that had been tailing us. It wasn’t parked directly across the street from the restaurant, and had I left through the front and walked to my car, I wouldn’t have seen it.

  As I got a little closer, I could see the device in the window, though it was back farther into the car than before, probably to escape detection.

  I stepped into a drugstore, so that I couldn’t be seen by the driver if he turned around. It was unlikely he would, since he was obviously expecting me to come out the front of the restaurant, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

  And I needed time to think. A week might not have been enough, but I knew I’d only have a few minutes.

  I had just come from a confrontation that I initiated that had accomplished very little; if I was going to do anything now, it had to be productive. I wasn’t worried about him knowing I was on to him; he had likely known that for a while.

  I decided that the best I could do would be to get a picture of him, and hope to use that to identify him. My cell phone had a camera on it, but I had never used it, and didn’t think I could figure it out in the moment.

  I bought one of those disposable cameras from the drugstore I was in, turned it on, and walked out of the store. I hadn’t been having lucky breaks for what seemed like a century, but I caught one when I noticed a police officer across the street, giving a ticket to a car that was illegally parked. If anything went wrong, I knew which way to turn.

  The first thing I did from my vantage point behind the car was to snap a shot of the license plate. I wasn’t sure how clear it would come out from that distance, but I figured it could always be enlarged.

  I walked up to the car on the passenger’s side, to reduce the chance that he would see me in the mirror. When I came close to the car, I took a deep breath and walked back into the street to the driver’s side. He hadn’t seen me yet.

  “Smile,” I said, and when he turned toward the sound, I snapped his picture. I then quickly took another picture of the device in the window.

  The surprise was evident in his face, but he recovered smoothly and smiled. “Give me the camera,” he said.

  “No chance. Why are you following me?”

  He started to open the door and get out, so I turned and called, “Officer! Help!”

  The man saw the officer, seemed to consider his options, and then got back in the car. “You’re a dead man,” he said, and then drove away.

  Sean Lassiter had no knowledge of the confrontation across from the restaurant.

  He had chosen to stay and finish his lunch. He thought that Kilmer might have waited outside, to see if the conversation had gotten him to cut the lunch short. He didn’t want Kilmer to think their meeting had upset him.

  But it had. It upset him a lot.

  Kilmer had started Lassiter’s downfall back when he was on top, but that was nothing compared to the stakes now. It could not be allowed to happen again. Because what Kilmer didn’t know, what no one knew, was that Lassiter had been having very difficult financial times for a long while now. He was living well above his means, and his dealings with Gates were his last chance to dig his way out.

  Of course, it would do more than just dig himself out. It would give him means that no one could live beyond.

  When he got home he called Gates. “We’ve got a problem. I had a visitor at lunch today. Richard Kilmer. He’s a magazine writer, and—”

  Gates cut him off. “I know who he is. What did he want?”

  “Information,” Lassiter said. “He thinks I know where his girlfriend is.”

  “Do you?” Gates asked, though he already knew the answer.

  “Of course not. But that’s not important. What is important is that he’s already connected me to you.”

  “That’s nothing to worry about; even the FDA knows we’re working together. There’s no way he can know what we’re doing. Our tracks have been covered.”

  “He’ll figure it out,” Lassiter said. “He’s done it to me before.”

  “Maybe eventually, but it would be way too late. And he could never prove it anyway. That’s the beauty of it.”

  Lassiter was not convinced, and said so. “We need to remove him from the picture.”

  Gates almost laughed into the phone, but caught himself. “You mean kill him?” He considered Lassiter’s reaction to this pathetic.

  “I mean whatever it takes,” Lassiter said. “In the last month he’s written two articles that have told the world he’s lost a woman who does not exist. Which means he’s announced that he’s both grief-stricken and probably insane.”

  “So?”

  “So he’s a textbook suicide waiting to happen. He just needs a little help.”

  Gates remained amused but also a little concerned. If Lassiter were to take matters into his own hands, it would be a disaster. “Just relax,” he said. “Let’s not do anything that draws attention to what we’re doing. We have time to deal with Kilmer if he gets close. Right now he doesn’t know anything. He couldn’t.”

  Lassiter finally calmed down and agreed with that assessment, but when Gates got off the phone he immediately called the Stone and told him what had transpired.

  The Stone was not amused, and his mood was already bad from the call he had just gotten from Juice, reporting on the confrontation at the car.

  The Stone had always prided himself on being a good judge of people; he had spent his life perfecting the art. But the people he had chosen
were not performing well. They would eventually die for their weaknesses, but right now that was small consolation.

  As he always did when a setback, however slight, occurred, he reassessed everything to see if any changes in the plan were warranted. This time he decided that the plan should survive intact, but that increased speed was necessary.

  He was so close.

  I spent the next twenty-four hours assessing the situation.

  I did this partially because a lot had happened, and I needed to figure out exactly what it all meant. But the main reason for my lengthy reflection was that I couldn’t think of what to do next.

  I wasn’t happy about the results of my encounter with Lassiter. I’m not really sure what I had hoped to accomplish, but whatever it was, I didn’t succeed. I learned nothing except an instinctive confirmation that Lassiter was doing business at Ardmore General, business that he wanted kept secret. But I really had already known that, based on the number of calls that Craig reported between Lassiter and the hospital.

  Also on the downside, if Lassiter wasn’t aware I was after him before, I had certainly tipped him off and helped him prepare. Kentris questioning Gates would have likely done so anyway, so that didn’t bother me too much.

  If I was trying to rattle Lassiter’s cage, I probably shook it gently instead. It wasn’t satisfying; what I really wanted was to put the son of a bitch in a cage for the rest of his life.

  I was more pleased with how things went in confronting the guy tailing me. I had gotten pictures of him, his license plate, and the device he was using. My plan was to give it all to Kentris; he would hopefully have the ability to use it to find out the guy’s identity.

  I didn’t want to send Kentris the camera itself, because I wanted to keep the pictures for myself. I brought the camera to the drugstore and asked them to develop five copies of each, hoping their promise of “one-hour photo” was legitimate. I also asked them to put the pictures on two CDs.

  The clerk seemed to know what she was doing, and I mentioned that these were very important pictures to me. If they screwed it up, bringing it there would have ranked as the stupidest thing anyone had ever done, and I regretted it the moment that I dropped the camera off.