by Taylor Smith
“Quite sure, but you go ahead.” Whatever it took to grease the wheel of candor, Mariah thought.
“I think I will,” Renata said. She busied herself with finding a glass and, apparently abandoning her hunt for the ice bucket, on trying to figure out how to get a few cubes out of the refrigerator-door dispenser. Mariah had the sense the woman rarely stepped into her own kitchen. “You know,” Renata said as a couple of ice cubes finally tumbled into her glass, “your father never did, either.”
“Never did what?”
“Care.” Renata waved a hand. “About all of this. In my entire life, I think he’s the only man I ever met who didn’t give a damn about my father’s money. The only one who couldn’t be bought. It was a little disconcerting, at first. In the end, though, it’s what I loved most about him.”
“I think you overestimate him,” Mariah said. “After all, you bought him for the price of a ticket to Europe.”
Renata shook her head. “Don’t imagine it gave me any control over him. He did exactly as he pleased. He went along because it suited his needs at the time, but when I tried to tighten that golden leash, he just slipped out of it and walked away. He wouldn’t be owned.”
“You must have felt used.”
“No. Well, perhaps at first,” she amended, disappearing for a moment and then reappearing with a bottle of scotch in her hand, the one commodity in her house whose location she seemed sure of. “In the end, I suppose I loved him more for his independence. It was quite refreshing. With everyone I ever met, before or since, the question was always there—were they interested in me, or in my father and his money and power?” Renata was filling her glass, but she paused, looking up. “Surely you’ve run into the same thing? It can’t be easy, being the daughter of someone as famous as Ben.”
Mariah shrugged. “I’ve been lucky. I met my husband in college. He was a physicist, brilliant in his own right. My father’s celebrity didn’t mean much to him. He’d been raised in a big family, and they were loving, close and sufficient unto themselves. When David and I got married, they just folded me and our daughter into their clan. My work is fairly esoteric, too, so it’s not often I meet people I haven’t known and worked with for years.”
“Well, then, you have been lucky. You must miss your husband.”
Mariah nodded. “Very much.”
“I never had anything like that. Except for that short while with Ben, I was never allowed to forget I was Arlen Hunter’s child and heir. They were all just so fascinated with Daddy,” Renata said bitterly. She capped the bottle and lifted her glass. “Cheers. What about Paul Chaney?” she asked after a sip.
“What about him?”
“Well, I’m sure he doesn’t need your money. He’s very accomplished in his own right. But he has that overly impressed quality about him, too, doesn’t he? I picked up on it right away. You must be quite attuned to it, yourself. It’s an intensity that comes into their faces, isn’t it, as they probe your life? If pressed, I’m sure Paul would say it’s the newsman in him, drawn to the human-interest side of men like our fathers. But in the end, in his own way, he’s one of the starstruck, too, isn’t he? I’ll wager he enjoys telling people he’s seeing Ben Bolt’s daughter.”
Mariah shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. We’re history.”
“Oh, dear. Not because of me, I hope?”
“That was just the proverbial straw. I don’t think Paul was in it for the long haul, anyway.”
“That kind rarely is.” Renata took another drink. “You’re sure you won’t join me?”
“No, thank you.”
“I see,” Renata said, arching one of her well-shaped eyebrows. “So, you came here to visit, but you’re not sure about socializing with the heartless home-wrecker, is that it?”
Mariah exhaled heavily. “I’m too tired to fight with you, Renata.”
“Why did you come, then?”
“I told you, I want my daughter back. Chap Korman and Louis Urquhart are dead—”
“Urquhart’s dead?” Renata said anxiously. “How?”
“Poisoned, I suspect. Sound familiar?”
The other woman began wiping the island countertop with one hand as she maneuvered her glass to her lips with the other.
“Renata?” Mariah pressed. “You know who did it, don’t you?”
“No. Why should I know anything?”
“Because you know about my father’s death. And Anatoly Orlov,” Mariah added. “Orlov was murdered by the KGB—by Zakharov. There’s no doubt about that anymore. The proof is coming out, and when it does, Zakharov will be unelectable. I thought it was my father who ratted on Orlov, and that he did do it to steal Orlov’s manuscript and pass it off as his own. But I just don’t believe it. Ben had too much pride in his own writing abilities to put his name on someone else’s work. Besides which, if he’d had a critical Orlov manuscript, Zakharov would have demanded he hand it over immediately, then killed him then and there. He wouldn’t have left him hanging around for three months. So, if Ben didn’t betray Orlov to Zakharov, the American who did was someone else. You, maybe?”
“Me? No!” Renata said indignantly.
“Could have been. You were losing Ben. You must have known people in the Soviet embassy through your father’s dealings with them. When Orlov gave Ben his manuscript, you might have reported it in a fit of pique, knowing the Soviets would yank Orlov back to Moscow. Only Ben was killed, too.”
“No! Ben died of natural causes. He told me he did!”
“He told you? Who?”
“I mean they told me,” Renata stammered. “French police.”
“No, Renata, you said ‘he.’” Mariah nodded, her suspicions confirmed. “Your father. He’s the one who told you Ben died of hepatitis, and said his body had to be cremated. And it was your father who betrayed Orlov, after you told him about the smuggled manuscript.”
“He wouldn’t have done that.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, of course he would! You said as much last night to Paul and me. Your father had billions tied up in joint ventures with the Soviets. He couldn’t afford to antagonize the Kremlin. He also wanted Ben out of your life—especially after the business with the smuggled manuscript. So your father betrayed both Orlov and my father to Zakharov.”
“Not Ben!” Renata cried. “He swore he didn’t say anything about Ben’s involvement!”
“Come on, Renata!”
“Anyway, Ben died long after Orlov was taken back to Moscow.”
“Orlov was sent to a sanitarium after his ‘collapse’ in Paris,” Mariah said, “a psychiatric clinic, the kind of place they generally sent people suffering from what they called ‘reformism of a paranoid nature.’ Nobody survived those places, Renata, especially when they were checked in by Zakharov. Nothing was secret there. Nothing. You can be sure Orlov cracked and told them where the manuscript was. Then he was executed. And while the Kremlin planned a great public funeral for the ‘hero of the people,’ Zakharov went to retrieve his manuscript.”
“No—”
“Yes! My father died in Paris on the same day Orlov was buried in Moscow. You can’t believe that’s a coincidence.”
“My father told me it was hepatitis!” Renata sobbed. “He swore it! He was concerned about Ben. He said he went to check up on him, even took him some antibiotics from home—”
Mariah slumped onto a stool across from the older woman, stunned. “He did it himself? Oh my God,” she breathed. “Your father injected Ben with the toxin himself.” Renata was crying, and Mariah herself was shaking like a leaf. She forced herself to take a deep breath. “What about Louis Urquhart?” she pressed.
“What about him?”
“Did he suspect what your father had done? Was that why he came to you first, Renata? To try to blackmail you? Is that why he had to die? To protect your father’s name?”
“My father’s name?” the older woman repeated with a bitter laugh. “My father was a ruthless scoundrel. That’
s hardly a national secret. Have you seen some of the biographies that have come out since he died? He made a fortune—several fortunes—dealing with dictators, propping up the Soviet regime. Don’t think Ben and Orlov were the only blood on his hands. There’s nothing Urquhart could have done to blacken my father’s name more than others already have—more than the old bastard blackened it himself. I would hardly murder a nonentity like Louis Urquhart to protect the name of Arlen Hunter.”
“But somebody murdered Urquhart. I think you have a good idea who that somebody is. Who else knew that he was getting ready to reveal the truth? Who would suffer dire consequences if Zakharov fell from grace? Who did you tell about Urquhart coming to see you?”
“My son,” Renata cried. “But I had to.”
“Why?”
“Because they wanted me to contact you and get you to withdraw that novel. I couldn’t imagine how it had even popped up after all these years. Who knew there was an English translation? I tried to tell Nolan it would be all right, that no one would ever find out it wasn’t Ben’s work. After all, even his agent thought it was his. But Nolan said Zakharov was insisting it was like pulling a loose thread in a garment. There was always the risk everything would unravel, and the whole truth would come out.”
“And when it did,” Mariah said bitterly, “guess who would be standing naked for the world to see, in all his wicked glory? Former KGB Colonel Zakharov, responsible for the deaths, among countless others, of not only Ben Bolt, but also of Russia’s beloved national hero, Anatoly Orlov. Not a winning presidential platform, I wouldn’t think.” Mariah exhaled heavily. “And if Zakharov falls, so does your son, doesn’t he? Nolan and his buddy, Porter. The architect moved in next door to Chap not long after the press found out about those papers I’d found. He was assigned to keep an eye on things. That was before any of you knew Urquhart had already stumbled onto the truth. The police thought Porter was working on a resort project in the Mediterranean, but I saw the site photographs in his house, and I just suddenly realized I’ve seen them before. Our satellites have been tracking the Nova Krimsky project since ground was first broken in the Crimea two years ago. The Russian mob is planning the largest gambling and money-laundering operation in the world there. Zakharov will provide governmental cover for the project in exchange for a percentage of the take, and he picked your son, Nolan—Arlen Hunter’s clever grandson—to head up the consortium of developers.” Mariah shook her head bitterly. “The more things change, the more they remain the same. Nolan brought in Porter. If Zakharov is ousted, they both stand to lose a fortune.”
“We all do.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The entire Hunter empire. I told you, I was terrible at business. I hated it.”
“Are you saying you ran the Arlen Hunter fortune into the ground over the decade you ran things?”
“Depleted it somewhat,” Renata said petulantly. “A lot, actually.” She reached for the phone.
“Who are you calling?”
“My son,” Renata said. “I’m scared.”
“Renata, listen to me,” Mariah said, staying her hand. “Porter has my daughter. I think he—and Nolan, too, I would imagine—thought they could convince me to walk away and forget I ever heard about Orlov or Zakharov or the manuscript. And maybe I might have, too, except it’s too late. The proof of what Zakharov did has already gone out to the media. The proverbial is going to hit the fan in the next twenty-four hours. There’s nothing you or I can do to stop it. But you can do the right thing and help me get my daughter back.”
“I can’t.”
“Dammit, Renata, you can!” Mariah cried. “You stole my father! Do you have to take my daughter away from me, too?”
“I loved Ben!”
“And your father murdered him! Are you going to let your son hurt his granddaughter? Is that the kind of family you are, every last one of you?”
“You don’t understand! Zakharov will kill Nolan!”
“Zakharov’s left the country, Renata! In any case, his days are severely numbered. I can’t imagine his mob cronies are going to look very kindly on this sort of publicity. If you go to the police and the FBI right away, you can get yourself and Nolan into some kind of protective custody before this hits the fan. But you have to work fast. You have to convince Nolan it’s over so he and Porter will give themselves up now and release Lindsay before Zakharov finds out his goose is cooked.”
“Do you really think Zakharov is finished?” Renata asked fearfully.
“I do, yes.”
“Then my son would be safe from him. Oh, wouldn’t that be wonderful? He’s held us all—my father, me, Nolan—in his grip for so long.” Renata exhaled a long, shuddering sigh. “All right. I’ll do it. But Mariah? Would you come with me?”
Mariah nodded. “I’ll drive you.”
Renata finished her drink, then rose slowly from her stool. “Just let me go and powder my nose,” she said. She left the kitchen, heading back for the front hall. Mariah was picking up her glass and putting it in the sink when a loud bump sounded from the front hall.
“Renata?” she called. “Are you all right?” She shouldn’t have let her drink so much, but it had seemed like the only way to break down those haughty defenses. Seen in this light, in fact, Renata seemed old and pathetic. Whatever else could be said about her, she did sincerely appear to have loved Ben. For that alone she deserved some empathy. Mariah hurried out of the kitchen, thinking she might have taken a tumble on the stairs. Oh, God, she thought desperately, what if she had? What about Lindsay then?
But when she got to the hall, she halted in her tracks. Renata’s eyes were wide above the hand clamped over her mouth—a massive hand belonging to Mr. Lermontov, Zakharov’s steroid-enhanced bodyguard.
Mariah heard a sound coming from behind her, but before she could turn to find the source, a vicious blow knocked her to the floor. She struggled back to her knees, but a second blow flattened her, and her face struck the cold, hard tile. As her head began to spin, she had a vague sensation of being lifted up and tossed over a shoulder, then carried down, down, down on an endless flight of stairs. Then she lost consciousness entirely.
When she again came to, briefly—hours later it must have been, because night had fallen—she smelled seawater. She was on a boat, she realized, lying on a rocking bunk in a dimly lit stateroom. From overhead, she heard angry shouts, and then a woman’s cry. Or was it a seagull? Mariah wondered as a symphony of color and noise exploded outside, lighting up the portholes around her. She had a brief memory of standing on the beach at night with her mother and father, all of them laughing and waving brilliant Fourth of July sparklers.
Then the darkness slipped over her once more.
Friday, July 5
Chapter Twenty-Six
The phone next to Scheiber’s bed rang at 2:00 a.m. Considering that this was supposed to be the new, improved version of his life, he thought, grabbing to silence the thing, it sure felt a lot like the old one. Liz and Lucas had driven down to watch the fireworks on the beach with him. He’d managed to stick with them from the opening salvo to the last rocket’s flare, but then he’d had to give them a quick kiss and rush off, leaving them to find their own way home while he rejoined the search for Mariah Bolt and her daughter—both of whom had vanished into thin air from practically right under his nose. He and Eckert had finally packed it in about midnight, planning to take up the hunt again at first light.
It was the night watch commander on the line. “Hey, Detective,” he said. “Thought you’d want to know. Old Buddy Higman found himself a girlfriend.” Buddy Higman was the resident drunk of Newport Beach—forty years old but looked like sixty, missing half his teeth, and possessed of the ruddy, bloodshot look of a man whose roof generally consisted of a refrigerator crate. “Only one problem,” the watch commander added. “She’s dead.”
“Yeah, well that’s about his speed, I guess. Where?”
“Washed up on the beac
h, bottom of Seventeenth, about halfway between the piers.”
“Is it the Bolt woman or her daughter?”
“Worse. You’d better get on down.”
Jeez, what now? “I’m on my way,” Scheiber said.
“Do you recognize her?” Dave Eckert asked Scheiber as they stood over the body of an elderly woman. The night was dark, moonless and hazy, eerily silent after the mass of people who’d crowded the beach just a few hours earlier. Only the white, rolling, low-rumbling surf broke the gray-black monotony of the oceanside view.
Eckert had beaten him to the scene—but then, Iris Klassen was there, too, Scheiber noted, even though no one had called the coroner’s office yet. Iris also happened to live in Laguna Beach, just a few miles down the coast from Newport. Old Eckert was making progress, he thought wryly.
Eckert had gotten some floodlights set up over the scene while waiting for Scheiber to arrive. The body of the woman on the sand was thin and well maintained, her facial skin artificially tight, although the looseness of the pasty gray flesh on her neck and hands, where little surgical help can be had, put her in her early sixties, Scheiber estimated. She was wearing some expensive jewelry—a filigreed gold neck chain, solid gold earrings and three heavy rings, two of them studded with chunky diamonds and sapphires. And that was all she was wearing.
“Can’t say I know her,” he said, smoothing down his mustache as the woman’s blind blue eyes, gone milky, stared up at him from the sand, looking a little startled to be there.
“Renata Carr,” Eckert said, adding when he still drew a blank, “Renata Hunter Carr? Of Hunter Oil? The Hunter Trust? The Arlen Hunter Museum? Newport society’s leading lady?”
And Ben Bolt’s onetime lover, Scheiber thought, recalling Mariah Bolt’s resentful references. How many more people linked to her would die before he got to the bottom of this?
“What’s wrong with you guys?” Scheiber grumbled to the assembled cops in general and no one in particular. “I thought I was coming down to work a cushy nine-to-five. Can’t you keep things under control better than this?” He crouched down on his haunches and peered at the body. “Buddy Higman found her just like this?”
