by Tom Clancy
“Must’ve gotten a lot easier this past year, year-and-a-half,” Ruiz said, and looked up from his pad.
DeSanto was silent a moment.
“You’re talking about him moving Corinna and the girl into the city, I’d say it was a better setup for all of them,” he said. “Easier for Patty, I know. Working in Manhattan, he can stop by their place in Chelsea almost every day. Lunchtime, after work, whenever he has a chance. Once a week he’ll stay there until late at night. Tells Mary . . . that’s his wife . . . tells her he’s with me watching a ball game. Sometimes he sleeps over there, says the game ran late, or we had too much to drink, or the weather’s bad.”
“And you always cover for him.”
DeSanto nodded.
“I’m his best friend,” he said. “I cover.”
Ruiz kept his eyes on him.
“Buying a Chelsea condo would’ve set Pat back two, three hundred grand at a bargain rate,” he said. “A few months later he leases Corinna a Jaguar, which also has to cost him a small fortune. And then according to you, he tells her she doesn’t have to work anymore . . . correct?”
DeSanto nodded again.
“Yeah,” he said. “He did all that.”
Which brought Ruiz to a very critical question.
“How?” he said. “Pat win the Super Lotto? Find a buried treasure chest in Central Park?”
DeSanto hesitated, then slowly met his gaze.
“It’s like what I told you before,” he said. “The big bucks started coming in for him after Armbright bought that Pak company—”
“This would be the Kiran Group.”
“Yeah,” DeSanto said. “When Pat was moved over to its international wholesale division, things really took off for him income-wise.”
“Must’ve taken off in the neighborhood of a few hundred thousand dollars a year over what he’d been earning.”
Silence. DeSanto examined his jacket, smoothed it down over his sides.
“I don’t have a clue how Pat found the extra padding for his wallet,” he said after a while. “Pat didn’t talk about it, I didn’t ask.”
“Never wondered?”
“Didn’t ask him, is what I just told you.”
“Your closest friend.”
“That’s right,” DeSanto said. “Sometimes part of being a friend’s realizing what not to talk about.”
“But you think Pat and Corinna talked about it,” Ruiz said.
DeSanto looked at him for a full thirty seconds before he finally nodded.
“Became pretty damn sure after Pat disappeared,” he said.
“When she phoned you looking for him.”
“She calls, his wife calls, I become information central,” DeSanto said with a bleak smile. “It starts one-thirty in the morning. Mary’s worried, leaves a couple messages on my machine—”
“This is last Wednesday.”
“Pat’s usual night to spend time with Corinna, right.”
“And your night to cover for him.”
“Right,” DeSanto said. “Pat always warns me when he plans to sleep over in the city instead of just stay late.”
“So your stories jibe for Mary.”
DeSanto nodded.
“Meanwhile, Pat hasn’t come home, Mary’s worried he might’ve got into an accident because of that storm, wants to know if he’s staying over at my place. At first I don’t pick up the phone, let her talk to my answering machine. Got no idea what to tell her.”
“Since Pat didn’t tip you he’d be spending the entire night at Corinna’s place.”
“Like the two of us have it worked out going back forever,” DeSanto said.
Ruiz nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s hear the rest.”
“Detective, no disrespect, but I need to get back to the bank—”
“Once more and you’ll be on your way,” Ruiz said, cutting off his objection with a firm look.
DeSanto shook his head with resignation, sighed heavily.
“Around two o’clock or so, after Mary’s third message, I decide to call Corinna’s, ask for Pat, pass on the information that the wife’s upset and he’d better get in touch,” he said. “What I’m guessing—this is when I call—is that he got caught up in some heavy action over there made him forget all about the wife for a while, you know how it goes.”
Actually, Ruiz didn’t. Not firsthand. Never in a million years, firsthand.
“And then what?” he said.
“Then the phone rings again practically while I’m reaching for it. I figure this’ll be Mary again, but instead it’s Corinna, who’s also half out of her skull with worry.”
“Looking for Pat?” Ruiz said.
“Yeah.” DeSanto’s voice had begun to tremble a little. “Said he’d left her place to meet somebody on business—”
“This is around ten o’clock.”
“He got the Jag out of the garage around ten-ish, right,” DeSanto said. “Told her he’d see her in an hour, hour-and-a-half, but never came back.”
“She didn’t mention who the somebody he’d gone to meet might be?”
“No.”
“Didn’t mention where they were supposed to be hooking up?”
“No.”
“Or what kind of business he could have had at that hour? In the middle of an ice storm?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t question her about it.”
“No, I didn’t,” DeSanto said. He shrugged. “It was one of those situations I explained to you.”
“When you felt you weren’t supposed to ask.”
DeSanto nodded.
“The next few days I’m on Corinna’s case like you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “Phoning her, arguing she needs to tell the cops whatever she knows. But she insists Pat would be against it. Says it’d ruin his marriage, bring everything about the two of them out into the open.”
And maybe bring out whatever it was he’d been doing to jump about five income brackets a year as a glorified parts salesman, Ruiz thought.
“So it goes back and forth between you,” he said.
“Without her budging an inch,” DeSanto said. “Corinna’s all crazed. Goes ballistic on me, saying I don’t know what it’s like to be in her shoes, stuff like that. Meanwhile, she tells me she’s checked some parking-violations page online, found out the Jag’s been towed to one of those police lots on the West Side. Which to me really proves something bad’s happened. Why in the world would Pat abandon it otherwise?”
“But you still held out on contacting the police yourself.”
DeSanto expelled another long sigh.
“It was a mistake,” he said. “Looking back now, if I’d do anything different, it’d be to call you people right away. But if Pat’s marriage blew up, I didn’t want the bomb that fell from the sky to have my name on its nose cone. I made a promise to him . . . I mean, years ago. Swore I’d keep his thing with Corinna secret no matter what. And stupid as it sounds, I felt it was on her to decide what to say about it. How much to say.” He shook his head. “When it finally got to where I had enough of waiting for her to get off the fence, and was ready to make the call, Corinna told me she’d been in touch with somebody who could help.”
Ruiz looked at him. This was one of the details that had piqued his interest during DeSanto’s first rendering of his story. “You’re positive that’s all she told you.”
“Yeah.”
“No mention of who that somebody was.”
“None.”
“But you didn’t get the impression it was the authorities.”
“That wasn’t the feeling that came across to me over the phone, no.”
“What sort of feeling did come across?”
DeSanto shook his head, spreading his hands a little.
“I can’t explain it,” he said. “Just that it wasn’t the police, you know.”
Ruiz let his answer stand right there, seeing no point in pressing any further. Bu
t he wondered if the somebody in question could have been the same person Sullivan had gone to meet that night he vanished, or if there were at least two mysterious somebodies in the picture so far.
He flipped a page in his pad, quickly read over his few remaining lines of scribbled notes, decided he was almost finished with DeSanto.
“Your final phone conversation with Corinna was yesterday?” he asked.
DeSanto nodded.
“If you want to refer to it as a conversation,” he said. “It was more like I talked, she yelled in my ear, then hung up on me.”
“And you didn’t hear from her after that.”
“No.” DeSanto said. “I tried to call back later on, got her machine. Would’ve tried again today . . . but then I saw that notice in this morning’s paper.”
“The police blotter.”
DeSanto nodded.
“I’m telling you, Detective, I almost choked on my breakfast,” he said. “Thought I’d never get the air back in my lungs.”
Silence. Ruiz gave himself a minute to digest it all. A man and woman having an adulterous affair disappear, you might assume they’d gone off into the rosy sunset hand-in-hand—except for their four-year-old daughter being left behind at the day care center. Plus, he himself had been in Corinna Banks’s apartment for a walkaround, and there had been every indication she’d only meant to step out for a few minutes. Freezer food thawing in the sink. Clothes in her mini washer/dryer. The television on, and the cable guide’s scheduler set for two different programs airing later on that night. So what to make of things?
Ruiz knew he had to act fast tracking down these two people—the longer you waited, the colder any trail they’d left would become. His first steps would be to run what DeSanto had told him by his squad commander, establish a liaison with the Nassau County detectives who were presumably on the Sullivan case . . . and have that Jaguar pulled out of DOT impound for inspection right away. He also wanted the okay to go wide with this thing. Call a news conference, issue regular press releases, get images of Sullivan and Banks onto the airwaves. He would personally distribute fliers and handbills all over town . . . whatever could be done to get the public’s help in conducting the investigation. With two missing persons here, and no clues to either one’s whereabouts, you wanted to open up as many sources of information as possible.
Ruiz sat thoughtfully for another minute, wondering if there was anything more to be gotten out of DeSanto while he still had the guy here in front of him. Then he decided he might as well recheck DeSanto’s contact information—his address, home and work phone numbers, and so forth—and let him head back to the office. They were done for the time being . . . aside from that one little question he’d been meaning to ask.
“Something I’m curious about, Mr. DeSanto,” Ruiz said. “You say you put off calling us because you felt obliged to keep your buddy’s secrets . . . went in circles with Corinna about that for a whole week . . . so how come you contacted me directly instead of using the anonymous tip line? That way you could have communicated everything you know, and still not have your name on that marriage bomb you mentioned.”
DeSanto didn’t answer for a moment. Then he tugged and smoothed his suit jacket again and sighed.
“When I read about Corinna, her disappearing so soon after Pat . . .” He looked at Ruiz, swallowed hard. “Me being Pat’s best friend, I was scared I might be next in line. And just between us, Detective, no damned promise is worth dying over.”
Lathrop was at a desk in the furnished shoebox of an apartment on Lexington Avenue with a bottle of beer beside his notebook computer and Missus Frakes perched on the other side of it staring at him. She’d managed to spring up there without needing a lift, and Lathrop supposed that made this one of her good days. He didn’t yet know what kind of day it would be for him, but some complications had emerged in the broad scheme of things, and he meant to decide whether or not he could minimize their damage to his plans, or even turn them to his advantage.
Lathrop took a drink of beer and looked at the old coon cat, his fingers around the bottle’s long neck.
“I thought we could sit tight a while longer,” he said. “If I’d gotten the Dragonfly keys out of Sullivan’s girlfriend, we’d be in a better position. But it is what it is, Missus Frakes. It is what it is. The house of cards I built for the two of us is feeling pretty shaky right about now, you agree?”
The cat watched him. Her gleaming limpid eyes were in contact with his, and they narrowed at the sound of his voice.
“Can’t pretend not to know what this thing with the girlfriend means,” Lathrop said. “It doesn’t leave much time, eliminates options.”
The coon stared at him from the top of the desk, her eyelids rising and falling in a demonstration of serene feline rapport. Lathrop approximated it with a blink of his eyes. In front of him his computer’s power was off, its screen raised but blank.
He lifted his beer bottle by its neck again, tilted it to his lips, took a long swallow.
“If I wanted to be conservative, I’d cut those options down to two,” Lathrop said. “And when time’s at a premium, conservative might be just the way to go.”
The cat continued to watch him. Lathrop ran a fingertip around the inside of the bottle’s mouth to wet it with a drop of beer and then held the finger straight out toward her face, moving it closer slowly to avoid startling her. Conditioned by past abuse, she flinched back a little anyway and straightened as if preparing for a defensive bat of her paw. Lathrop became very still, held the finger about a half inch in front of her nose until she leaned forward and sniffed it. Then she relaxed her guarded posture and licked off the beer, her tongue like sandpaper against his skin.
Lathrop let her finish having her taste, pulled back his finger, and switched on the computer.
“It’s coming up on zero hour, Missus Frakes,” he said. “Zero hour in the house of cards. And if we intend to come out ahead, we need to grab a joker or two out of the air, run with them fast as we can.”
Lathrop thought a moment. He already knew who one of his e-mail recipients would be. The other, though . . . he wanted to give the other a spot more consideration.
He recalled an interesting night in the park a few years ago. Balboa Park in San Diego, to name the place. He’d been right in the middle of some heavy fireworks between a couple of narco barons serving payout on a blood feud, and for Lucio Salazar and Enrique Quiros, the end result had been mutually exclusive to their lives—buenas noches, amigos, no loss. UpLink’s security ops had been in the thick of that donnybrook, too, and Lathrop’s brief encounter with their man in charge had left him feeling there was a deep, rich vein of secrets running in that particular gent, secrets he might plumb and use to his advantage somewhere down the line. But that was only part of what he’d sensed, and maybe even the lesser part. For the brief moment they had faced one another in the shadows, Lathrop had felt an inexplicable kinship with him, a resonance of a sort he’d never known before or since. It had been as if he’d seen a figure on the surface of a dark, still pool that conformed so closely to his outlines it could not have been mistaken for anything but his own reflection . . . and then had looked over his shoulder and suddenly realized it belonged to someone else, someone standing right there behind him at the edge of the mirrored water. Lathrop hadn’t forgotten that jarring impression, couldn’t have forgotten it. In fact, it had driven him to find out the man’s name and store it away in his mental book of people to remember.
Now Lathrop brought up UpLink International’s corporate Web site on his browser, skipped the animated graphic introduction, clicked on the icon for its main American bureau, and then went through several drop-down menus until he reached the contacts list for its security staff. There was an electronic mail link to the chief of security—[email protected]—but nothing for the person in question.
Lathrop didn’t think guessing it would be a problem—organizations the size of UpLink almost a
lways used consistent user-ID–host-domain address formats. If two or more employees had the same name there might be initials or some other characters attached to the user IDs to distinguish between them. But his man’s name wasn’t too common . . . certainly he was no John Smith . . . and Lathrop thought the odds were low that anyone in his division would share it. Still, he’d keep his message vague enough so it would mean absolutely nothing if it reached the wrong person, and at the same time embed it with a verbal cue to assure his intended party knew full well who’d sent it. Unless, of course, it simply bounced . . . in which case he would have to do some more guesswork.
Logging on to his anonymous client server, Lathrop opened a new message window and addressed it to: thomas. ricci @ uplinksanjo. sword. com.
Then he wrote and sent his e-mail, snapped off another to the candidate he’d originally decided to reach out and touch, and finally leaned back in his chair.
The choice was either to play the wildcards in hand or get caught holding a wasted bluff, Lathrop thought.
He was curious to see how his latest play turned out.
Tom Ricci had a face of hard stone carved in extreme, jagged contrasts. His brow formed a prominent ridge over deep hollows that trapped his eyes in shadow. His high, wide-spaced cheekbones seemed in danger of piercing the skin stretched tight over their sharp points and juts. His nose was straight except at the bridge, where it was thickened and a bit skewed from an old, badly repaired break. His long, angular chin ended in a blunt wedge, as if the hand that sculpted it had been seized by a fit of impatience, bringing work on it to a finish with an abrupt, dead blow of the mallet. These contours flouted predictability; a fine cut this way or that, a careful tap of the chisel, and it would have been easy to call them handsome. Instead one regarded them uneasily, sought balance where none could be found.
Hard stone, too, his expression. Cold and unvarying, it chilled the eye. For years Pete Nimec had been able to see a rough compassion—a stark decency—embedded within its angry lines and angles, but that had ended when the Killer did his damnable work on those young recruits in Ontario. And with the Killer dead, even the anger had been scraped away.
