The Innocents Club

by Taylor Smith

  “Apparently a big fan of your father’s,” Eckert explained.

  “That must have been whose house she was calling from,” Mariah insisted. “Maybe you just missed them while they were out with the dog.”

  Scheiber nodded. “Could be, although I’d be surprised if they returned without being seen. But let’s go check again,” he said, starting up the walk of the house next door to Chap’s. “Just stay clear of that property line,” he added, nodding in the direction of the other yard, which was beginning to look like a war zone.

  Not that this one was much better, Mariah thought. They crossed a starkly landscaped courtyard and rang the doorbell of a dour, angular house obviously designed to be intellectually interesting rather than welcoming. Between the extraterrestrial appearance of the house and its landscape, and the space-suited Haz Mat technicians working next door, Mariah felt as if she’d been dropped into a bad science fiction movie. The doorbell gonged, deep and throaty, but there was no answer. Scheiber rapped sharply on the bloodred steel door, but met only silence.

  “No dog, either,” he noted. “It went crazy when we came to the door yesterday.”

  “Do you mind?” Mariah asked, indicating the big window to the right of the door. When the detective nodded, she walked over and cupped her hands around her eyes, peering inside. It looked like a living room–cum–office, but it was nearly as stark and uncomfortable-looking as the front courtyard. There was precious little furniture, and only one or two pieces of artwork, but the walls were half covered in what looked like blueprints and aerial photographs of a massive construction site.

  “It’s some resort he’s working on over in Europe,” Scheiber said, peering in alongside her. “Somewhere on the Mediterranean, I think.”

  Mariah peered around for a moment longer, then pulled away. “I don’t like the fact that this guy seems to have just wandered off with my daughter,” she said. Despite her best efforts to stay calm and to reassure herself that Lindsay was fine and merely walking a basset hound on a beach somewhere, a steady stream of pimps, rapists and serial killers was already intruding on her thoughts, like a horror movie running on fast forward.

  “If it’s any comfort to you, we think the guy’s gay,” Scheiber said.

  Mariah pulled back, frowning. “Do you happen to have a daughter, Detective?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.”

  “Then you know that’s small bloody comfort.”

  “Yeah, I do,” he said, chagrined. “You want to give me that picture of your daughter? I’m sure she’s going to turn up any minute, but just in case, I’ll get my partner here to take it in and scan it into the system and make up some copies.”

  Mariah waited, but Lindsay still hadn’t shown up an hour later when Eckert returned. He met them at a nearby drive-in restaurant where she and Scheiber had gone ostensibly to grab a bite to eat—although food was the last thing on her mind—while she brought him up to speed on what she and Frank thought the motive might be for the murders of both Chap Korman and Louis Urquhart.

  As Eckert slipped into the red vinyl booth next to Scheiber, he slid a digitally retouched picture of Lindsay across the table, one that substituted a cap of short copper curls for the long hair in her school photo. “I hope this is a close approximation of what she looks like now.”

  “My God, yes, this is great,” she told him gratefully.

  “It’s what I do,” he said, blushing a little. “Every Newport cop on foot, bike or cruiser duty is getting a copy. The watch commander sent it over to the sheriff’s department, too.”

  “They won’t do much with it over there, I have to warn you,” Scheiber added, “except add it to an already long inventory of runaway teens.”

  “She’s not a runaway, Detective,” Mariah insisted. “Would a runaway have phoned the hotel to let me know where she was?”

  “But you did say you’d had an argument, and that she’s been upset lately?”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t anything we couldn’t work out. We would have been well on our way by now to doing just that,” she added, pushing away the sandwich she hadn’t wanted, anyway. “I wouldn’t have had to leave her alone at the hotel if you and your LAPD buddies hadn’t done such a damn stupid thing as arrest Frank Tucker for murder.”

  “Where is he, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Mariah said. That was troubling her, too. She’d been trying to reach him for the past hour, but the phone he was carrying was either malfunctioning or turned off, because she kept getting a recorded announcement saying that the cellular customer she was calling was unavailable. Finally, Mariah had called back to the Beverly Wilshire, but Ms. Latham had informed her she’d personally checked both phones before handing them over that morning. She also said Frank had left the hotel at least a couple of hours earlier, after having asked her to find him a courier service that would be open on the Fourth of July holiday. Service at the Beverly Wilshire and the American entrepreneurial spirit being what they were, she had been able to do that. So, Mariah thought, if Frank was just dropping off copies of the Navigator’s remaining file for delivery to media outlets, why wasn’t he answering his phone? The answer, she realized, might simply be that, technophobic as he was, he’d forgotten to turn the damn thing on.

  “Look, I can’t stand just waiting around anymore,” she said, grabbing one of Eckert’s photos of her daughter. “I’m going to walk over to the beach and see if I can spot her and this bloody neighbor and his dog.”

  “Dogs aren’t allowed on the beach,” Eckert pointed out.

  “Fine. I’ll take the car and look anywhere a dog might be. The point is, I have to move. But I’ll have my cell phone on and you’ve got the number, so please, if she shows up, call me, all right?”

  Scheiber sighed. “We’d better get back over and see how they’re doing at Korman’s, anyway. But Ms. Bolt? To coin a tired old phrase, don’t leave town, okay? I’m not even close to running out of questions for you.”

  Mariah stood in her bare feet in the sand, fingers looped through her sandal straps, watching with a large crowd of onlookers as half a dozen daredevil bodysurfers challenged the crashing waves of The Wedge. Situated at the very end of Newport Beach, where a long jetty protected the inlet to Newport Harbor, The Wedge had some of the most famous and most dangerous waves in southern California, created by the strong crosscurrent of the incoming tide and the backwash off the jetty. She’d ridden those waves herself when she was young, but posted signs warned that only the very strongest swimmers should attempt them. For those who could handle it, the rush made the risk worthwhile, but at this point, Mariah thought, she’d had about as much death-defying experience as she cared to experience in one lifetime.

  She’d spotted the large group of people on reaching the end of the peninsula, and had quickly pulled over, risking a ticket by parking illegally in a red zone while she rushed over to see if Lindsay had by chance made it this far down the beach and was enjoying the spectacle with the rest of the crowd.

  It would happen as easily as that, Mariah kept telling herself. She would suddenly spot Lindsay’s copper curls, and find out she’d wandered off and lost track of the time, as kids were wont to do. That she was safe, and this nightmare was over. She wouldn’t even get angry, she promised herself. She’d just hug Lindsay, and tell her she loved her, and they’d go somewhere and have a good, long, honest talk.

  Please, God, let me just have her back.

  But Lindsay wasn’t in the crowd at The Wedge. Sick at heart, Mariah turned back toward her car. And then, froze. Across the inlet, in Corona del Mar, high on a cliff overlooking the harbor and all of Newport, sat the massive summer home of the late Arlen Hunter. And as she looked across the water, remembering the sight of it, an old children’s skipping song came into Mariah’s head, one that she had always associated with the woman who’d taken her daddy:

  On the mountain stands a lady,

  Who she is I do not know.

  All she
wants is gold and silver,

  All she wants is a fine young man.

  It seemed more appropriate than ever, she thought grimly, remembering Renata’s balancing act between her fortune and the young man before whom she’d dangled her money like a lure. Back at the car, she hurried to dust the sand off her feet as a little green parking warden’s van approached along the line of cars, looking for expired meters and illegals like herself. She was cramming her feet into her sandals when her cell phone rang.

  “Frank!” she cried when she realized who it was. “Where are you? I’ve been trying to reach you forever.”

  “I’m on my way down there. I turned off the phone for a while. I was doing a little surveillance and I needed to be in silent running mode. Did you find Lindsay?”

  “No, and I’m getting really worried. She was at Chap’s house, and then she was seen with his neighbor, but she’s vanished.”

  He cursed softly, and then added, “She’s not the only one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Zakharov and most of his delegation up and left last night.”

  “I thought he was staying for the Pacific Rim conference. It kicks off tonight with a gala reception on the Queen Mary.”

  “Apparently Zakharov decided he needed to be back in Moscow, tending his political fires and maneuvering for the prime minister’s job.”

  “You said ‘most of his delegation.’ Who’s still in town?”

  “Your Mr. Belenko, for one. I gather he’s going to carry on at the Pacific Rim conference. One or two other support personnel. Not only that,” Frank added, “but the Pushkin, the ship Zakharov was staying on while he was here? I just left the port and it looks like it’s making ready to leave.”

  “Because of the murders,” Mariah said, fist clenching. “Zakharov’s got my father’s papers and Urquhart’s research, and now he’s out of here, leaving his mess behind. Doesn’t need his base of operations anymore.”

  “That would be my guess,” Frank agreed.

  “You got the file copied, I hear.”

  “It’ll be delivered first thing in the morning to every American and international media outlet and foreign correspondent I could find—including Pravda, Izvestia and half a dozen of the new, autonomous Russian press outfits.”

  “Good. Some of them are bound to run it. Zakharov’s going to get a nasty surprise when he opens his paper in the next day or so,” Mariah said. “I’d be happier if he could stand trial here for what he and his people did to Chap and Louis Urquhart, but at least—”

  “That’s a bit of a problem,” Frank interrupted.

  “How so?”

  “I spoke to a friend of mine in FBI counterintelligence. We were in the navy together. He’s been involved in keeping Zakharov and his people under surveillance this week. He says there’s no way any of them could have killed Korman, and probably not Urquhart, either.”

  “What? How is that possible? Both killings have all the hallmarks of the Dzerzhinsky Borgia. And, get this—Scheiber stumbled across a toxin in Chap’s roses. The M.O. sounds identical to that case in London several years back where the Russian defector was poisoned in his rose garden. That was Zakharov’s handiwork, through and through.”

  “That may be,” Frank said, “but my guy in the Bureau has all the Russians present and accounted for. All except your friend, Belenko, that is. He gave them the slip once or twice, but only for brief periods.”

  A puttering sounded behind her, and Mariah glanced in her rearview mirror to see the parking warden moving up on her bumper. “Hang on, Frank, I’ve got to move or I’m going to pull a two-hundred-dollar standing violation.” She dropped the phone on the seat beside her and quickly started the engine, pulling out of her illegal space with a squeal of tires just as the meter maid was climbing out with her ticket book. In the rearview mirror, Mariah caught the woman’s scowl. She headed back down Balboa Boulevard, picking the phone off the seat once more. “You still there?” she asked.

  “Still here,” he said. “Tell me where you are.” She gave him Chap Korman’s address and told him to watch for the Haz Mat unit. And to drop Scheiber’s name to get in. “I’ll be there inside the hour,” Frank said.

  It hit her suddenly, with the brute force of a tsunami.

  After she’d finished talking to Frank, Mariah was driving around in the late-afternoon sun, searching for Lindsay with a sick, growing fear that there was some terrible clue she’d missed, and that her daughter was lost to her because of it. At the same time, she was mulling over Frank’s surprising news that neither Zakharov nor any of his delegation might have been responsible for the murders of Korman and Urquhart.

  And then she remembered something one of her history professors had once said about tyrants down through the ages. The truly great tyrant, he’d suggested, is the one who inspires zealous disciples to do his bloody work for him. Alone, a Ghengis Khan, a Stalin, a Hitler is nothing. But give them dedicated fanatics to lead, and they become a terror. To that principle, Mariah added a particularly American corollary—follow the money. And suddenly, in one of those blinding moments of insight that come to mere mortals once or twice in a lifetime at best, she understood both what had happened thirty years ago and in the last forty-eight hours.

  Instead of making another circuit of the beach area, she drove off the peninsula and headed down the Pacific Coast Highway to Corona del Mar, thinking about her father. The man should have been required to wear a warning label. Loving him had been hazardous, trusting him downright dangerous. After everything he’d done to those who’d loved him, there was a certain poetic justice to his having ended up broke and utterly alone when he died. But that said, had he been a thief, and therefore guilty of betraying his friend and fellow writer? Would he have stolen Anatoly Orlov’s work? She didn’t think so. The only thing he’d ever dedicated himself to and believed in wholeheartedly was the power of the written word. He’d never suffered any doubt where his own talent was concerned, and he’d been a prolific writer. Why steal another man’s work? For the money, to pay his way home? Then why send it to his wife and tell her to hold it for him, instead of to his agent or publisher? It made no sense.

  Crossing the Newport inlet, Mariah took her first right turn, driving by instinct. Once she turned onto Deep Cove Drive, it was easy enough to pick out the place she was looking for. Even if the stone wall that isolated the sprawling compound hadn’t given away its location, Arlen Hunter’s initials woven into the wrought-iron gates would have done the trick. Pulling into the wide drive, she leaned on the intercom button, surprised to hear Renata herself answer after a few moments.

  If Renata was shocked to find Mariah at her gate, it wasn’t obvious by her voice. A buzzer sounded and the massive gates swung inward, the wrought iron A and H parting in welcome. As she drove up the circular red brick drive, Mariah saw the front door of the house open and Renata come down the broad front stairs to meet her.

  “So you came, after all,” the older woman said, watching her get out of the car.

  “You knew I would,” Mariah said. “I want my daughter.”

  “Your daughter? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do.”

  Renata frowned. “I have no idea why you would think that, but why don’t you come in and we’ll discuss it? I’m pleased you came. A little surprised, but pleased,” she added, watching Mariah climb the steps. “I’d actually hoped to invite you out so we could get to know each other, but last night didn’t go quite the way I’d planned. Have you eaten? I’m not much of a cook, but I’m sure we can pull something together.”

  “I’m fine,” Mariah said.

  Despite her superficial ease, Renata seemed to feel the need to fill the silence with chatter in the form of a tour commentary. “My father had this house built in the forties, right after the war,” she said. “William Boyd was the architect, but Daddy added several specifications of his own design. I think it drove Boyd crazy, but Daddy w
as what you’d probably call a control freak. We spent summers here, when we weren’t traveling. After my father died in ’88, I started staying down year-round. You can still see the Hunter Oil rigs from the front gallery. They were some of the first offshore rigs ever built in California.”

  She was dressed in a sleeveless, tan linen dress and a filigree gold necklace and earrings. As she held out a matchstick arm to wave her inside, Mariah noticed the wattled flesh on its underside.

  “We’re on our own,” Renata told her. “I gave the staff the day off. I wish my son were here, but unfortunately, he’s out with his friends.”

  “Is Nolan your only child?”

  “Yes.”

  “I gather he’s become very involved in running your father’s companies?” Mariah asked.

  “Yes, he seems to have quite a knack for it,” Renata said. “One of those talents that skips a generation, I suppose. Personally, I always found business a little boring. My husband handled things briefly after Daddy died, but then he died, too, and it all fell to me. Ten years I had to carry the Hunter trusts and corporations all on my own. I’m delighted that Nolan seems eager to take on that load now. Can I offer you a drink, Mariah? I was just filling the ice bucket actually.”

  “No, but go ahead,” Mariah said.

  The older woman led her across that broad, black-and-white-tiled vestibule of Mariah’s childhood memory, waving her fingers in the direction of the sinuously curved staircase, continuing her tour commentary. “The wood is South American mahogany. The balustrade was hand-carved in France, then shipped, and reassembled in—”

  “Renata?” Mariah said, interrupting her.

  “Yes?”

  “I really don’t care.”

  The older woman glanced at her sharply, then nodded. “No, of course you don’t. This way.” She led Mariah through a door at the back of the stairs, along a serving hall that connected to the dining room, then into a massive kitchen. “Have a seat while I find the ice bucket,” she said, opening cupboards, one after the other. “I know it’s here somewhere. Are you sure I can’t get you a drink?”