Toni didn’t miss the fact that Roman had called her “my darling.” She couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like to strip naked and run through the woods by his side, drenched in the light of the full moon—free as a white-tailed deer.
Without thinking, Toni said, “Oh, Roman, I wish you weren’t married!” No sooner had she spoken than the blood drained from her face and she bit her knuckle. “Oh God, how could I? The last time I wished for something, Lincoln ended up dead.”
“No, sweetheart,” said Roman, putting his hand on her shoulder, “I think you realize that neither Laura Armbruster nor I will remain married to our respective spouses very long. But a wish can’t kill someone. Your husband was murdered—and, as we have just learned, it wasn’t the result of your thoughts or your words.”
“But he was murdered—even if Jason didn’t do it,” insisted Toni. “That stereo system was tampered with—and by someone who must have known that he had stainless steel fixtures in his private office bathroom. So who could have done it?”
“Whoever it was, he’s still at large,” agreed Roman. “Dearest, now that you’re in the clear, I think we should notify the police. How do we know that Lincoln’s death isn’t somehow connected with these recent murders? After all, he was a resident of Gryphon Gate.” Then he added, “Too bad Tiffany had to rush off so fast with those tapes for Mrs. Clancy, or we might have learned what else they had gleaned by spying on you and Jason.” When he saw that Toni had paled again, he said, “What’s wrong?”
“Roman, I’m afraid I may have made a terrible mistake,” Toni told him. “Things were so confusing when Tiffany came barging in here today. She’s so commanding I felt exactly like those people she said her friends drugged during the church service—I felt that I had to do whatever she said because she knew everything about me!”
Roman had set down his glass and grasped her by the wrists. “What mistake?”
“I thought she knew everything, Roman,” Toni said tearfully.
There was a brief moment when Roman felt the desire to lap the tears from her face with his wolfish tongue. He tried to focus.
“She knew my innermost thoughts,” Toni was going on. “She knew all Lincoln’s perversions and Jason’s deceptions. Lincoln had already concealed so much from me, so I assumed that whatever Tiffany said about Mrs. Clancy must be right, too.”
“Your sister-in-law?” said Roman. When Toni said nothing, he added, “You mean Lincoln’s sister?—Mrs. Clancy, who hired Tiffany to learn the truth?”
“Roman,” said Toni, “Lincoln never had a sister. At least, not that I ever heard of. He was adopted from an orphanage; I can show you the papers. Miranda and I were the only ones mentioned in his will. When he died, no other relative came forward, despite the enormous press coverage—and Lincoln was a very wealthy man.”
They stared at each other for a long, long moment, digesting just how this might fit into the larger picture. At last Roman cleared his throat and said, “Tiffany never met her client—Mrs. Clancy was just a voice on the phone.”
“How do you know that?” asked Toni.
“Because when Tiffany left here just now, she told me she was going to meet her client, Mrs. Clancy, face-to-face for the first time—and receive her final payment.”
Neither of them wanted to imagine just what that final payment might be.
“Roman, there is only one woman I know of who hates me enough to try to frame me for murder. And I don’t even know what I might have done to deserve that. I’m sure she planted Sigmond Vormeister’s Palm Pilot in my yard where Miranda would find it; she drowned Anka in my koi pond; and she has planted deer chow at the murders, when everyone knows I feed the deer! She has made her intentions so clear. I’m afraid for Tiffany, if there’s even a chance my suspicions are right!”
“Darling,” said Roman urgently, “we must go to the police at once!”
“That’s the one place I absolutely cannot go,” said Toni, tears welling up again. “Don’t you see, Roman? The person I’m talking about—the one who’s been trying to frame me all this time—is Captain Diane Robards of the metropolitan police!”
* * *
There was a tap on Capt. Diane Robards’s door. She’d escaped there, going over papers in her temporary office at the security station. Her head hurt so much that she seriously contemplated crawling under the desk so they’d think she was out to lunch. Well, thought Robards, I am out to lunch—at least in this cockeyed investigation.
“Come in,” she snarled as uninvitingly as possible. Leland Ford popped his head around the door. She was about to tell him to get lost—though she remembered his hands on her shoulders, his lips warm against hers—the only worthwhile input she’d received to date on this case.
Leland smiled, as if apologizing for not being able to deliver more of the same, and she started to melt down again—which infuriated her. God, she was confused.
“You have a visitor,” he said. “Somebody who has new evidence, so she claims.”
“She?” said Robards, nodding to wave the visitor in.
Great. It had to be a woman. Robards had never seen so many useless, sex-crazed bimbos as the ones they seemed to breed here at Gryphon Gate—she winced at her own double entendre.
She had hardly failed to notice the percentage of kids with green eyes, nor the fact that Doctor Jefferson, the breeding expert in more ways than one, had the same color eyes—eyes gouged out by the murderer only two days ago.
But when Robards saw who Leland was ushering in, she had to dig her fingernails into her palms to keep from groaning.
“Permit me to introduce myself officially,” said the middle-aged woman as she reached across the desk to hand Robards an ID card the size of a passport, protected by a plastic wrapper.
“Of course I know who you are, Mrs. Kaplan,” said Robards, motioning for both her visitor and Leland to take a seat.
“Not quite,” said Mrs. Kaplan. Turning to Leland Ford, she added, “You will no longer be needed, and we will call for you if you are.”
Robards started to object, but then she glanced at the card she’d been handed:
Cunegonde Schelling
Reuters News Service, Vienna
Official Press Pass, 1960–69
Beneath it was a photo of a young woman—striking, handsome, but not beautiful; short-cropped blonde hair with a small fringe of bang; prominent Roman nose. The perfect likeness, on an old coin, of young Caesar Augustus when he was still Octavian. And, as unmistakable as the rain that was now pounding against the windows, it was the portrait of the woman who stood before her—Mrs. Kaplan, some forty years ago.
Leland left the room and Mrs. Kaplan took a seat; Robards let her fingers drift over her computer keyboard as if she were playing a brief run of a Chopin Fantasie. Up popped the FBI profile screen:
Cunegonde “Cundy” Schelling; b. 1939, Vienna, Austria; parents d. WWII; award-winning career as investigative undercover journalist: Baader-Meinhhof gang in Germany, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Red Brigades in France; Fulbright 1970 to Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; m. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Hiram Kaplan (1919–1983); 2 children—Rachel, 1972, Aaron, 1984
“You’re actually Cundy Schelling?” Robards looked up at Kaplan in disbelief. A name legendary in journalism, like Margaret Bourke-White or Oriana Fallaci.
“In person,” said the woman she’d regarded as a bumbling Jewish mom.
Robards felt sick. No wonder this investigation was going nowhere. She, Diane Robards, was being investigated by the suspects themselves! And their mothers! If Mrs. Kaplan’s credits were any indication, they all probably had better credentials than her own staff.
“Captain Robards,” said Mrs. Kaplan (despite her soft Viennese accent, she sounded impatient), “I think we have—shall I be polite and say ’procrastinated’?—on this investigation long enough. As a journalist, I am obliged to relate to others, put myself in their shoes, sense what makes
them tick. From the first, as I watched you conduct your inquiry, I knew you were handicapped in your job because you don’t want to think of yourself as a woman. You lack compassion. You are so tied to the success of your career—your obsession with facts, figures, forensics—that you cannot see the people involved. My inside sources have confirmed these fears.”
“Inside sources?” said Robards, digging her nails deeper. She wanted to pop star investigative journalist Cunegonde Schelling Kaplan right in her perfect white teeth. “Perhaps you could share those sources with me, Mrs. Kaplan? Or am I being too inquisitive? Maybe you require no help from the police? Let me guess: through compassion, you have already divined who the murderer is?”
“Yes, I do know who the murderer is, Captain Robards,” Cundy said, not dropping a beat. “I believe we can lay all five murders at the same person’s door. Though I can’t prove it yet, I believe I know where the last piece of evidence can be found to help put this heinous killer behind bars for a long, long time.”
Diane sighed. This couldn’t be real. She knew who “the heinous killer” was? But she had noted that Mrs. Kaplan said five murders, not the four of record. Diane’s headache seemed miraculously to have vanished. Maybe she was just delirious.
“Mrs. Kaplan,” said Diane Robards, “I hope I may ask something, without your taking it the wrong way. But how long, would you say, has it been since you have done any real investigative journalism?”
“I’ve never stopped,” said Cunegonde Schelling, her blue eyes like steel razors. “You see, Captain Robards, my late son-in-law, Sigmond, was working with me on the investigation of Gryphon Gate, long before any murders took place. I am convinced that our investigation was the direct cause of Sigmond Vormeister’s death.”
Kaplan and Vormeister were investigating Gryphon Gate? Could this be the missing button she’d been praying for in this button-down community?
“What piece of evidence are you missing?” Robards asked with excitement.
“Didn’t you wonder how everyone in Gryphon Gate received faxes, demanding they come to Sunday’s church service,” said Cundy, “when Reverend Armbruster himself knew only hours earlier what the theme of the service would be?”
Robards was too humiliated to confess she had checked every possibility in her Rolodex for a preplanned scenario—and that she had come up with zip. She just nodded for Kaplan to continue. After all, the woman thought she knew something.
“Proverbs 11:13,” said Cundy Kaplan. “’A talebearer revealeth secrets’—”
“Three secrets were revealed at the service,” agreed Robards, privately chuckling to recall the zany occasion—the first levity in this whole dismal affair.
“But we’ve checked them all out,” Robards added. “Laura Armbruster had some bet with Gervase, the werewolf, involving their faithless spouses. It’s personal—unrelated to our case. Then ‘Jerry Lynch,’ aka ‘Ronald Roach,’ served time in Boston for a real estate scam at Harvard, selling dim-witted undergrads bogus historic titles to plots in the Harvard Yard. Jerry’s still pulling the same crap now—on Wall Street, as I understand it. They never learn, but it doesn’t add up to murder. Then we have Toni Sinclair—now there’s a possibility for you!” Her eyes lit up. “Hubby Lincoln had just sold his high-tech business for gazillions, then accidentally electrocuted himself on the john. Rumors abound that Toni and her lover, Jason Salinger, ’arranged’ a few things.…”
Robards stopped because Mrs. Kaplan was on her feet heading for the door.
“Captain Robards,” said Kaplan, “regardless how despicable the dead may have been, they did little to deserve you as the only officer resolving their murders. Anyone who talks as much as you do could not possibly have time to learn anything new.” Robards was rendered speechless—but Cundy hadn’t quite finished.
“Proverbs 11:13,” she reminded Robards. “Look it up. Then give me a call. I’ll be at my daughter, Rachel’s.”
As Kaplan turned to go, Robards quickly tapped into her computer: BIBLE, OLD TESTAMENT, PROVERBS 11:13.
And the answer came back: “A talebearer revealeth secrets. But he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter.”
A faithful spirit? In this quagmire of greed, lust, and deception? Robards almost snorted. But when she looked up, she saw Cunegonde Schelling Kaplan, in her long black cape, sweep through the office door and shut it soundlessly behind her.
* * *
Vanessa Smart-Drysdale, wearing a chic, taupe suede pantsuit, paced restlessly before the floor-to-ceiling windows of her posh Alexandria high-rise. Her longtime trysting place with Sen. Edward “Ned” Carbury, the flat had been her best-kept secret.
Vanessa had purchased these executive suites overlooking the Potomac from Lincoln Sinclair when he’d wanted to cut a deal on her property at Forest Glen. Vanessa would never forget the terrified expression on the face of that idiotic wife of his—Toni—when she learned her husband had been fried like a frittata on his executive toilet—right here, downstairs in the business offices of the Sinclair Building. What a joke. As if Toni hadn’t planned the whole thing herself, with Jason Salinger.
Vanessa watched with mounting tension as black rain clouds gathered, obliterating her view of the Maryland shore. Around the bend lay Gryphon Gate.
Vanessa had waited half the morning at her Forest Glen property for that little skateboarding twerp, Aaron Kaplan, to meet her. Now she was nervous beyond belief. The idiotic child had threatened to blackmail her with data he had decrypted (he’d actually used that Captain Marvel term) from Sigmond Vormeister’s files—information about her “affair” with Ned Carbury!
Vanessa—never one to be taken unawares by a teenage boy—had immediately counter-offered with the proposal of building an $800,000 skate park at Forest Glen.
The park would be thirty thousand square feet—the largest in the state of Maryland, including seven-foot half pipes, eight-foot quarter pipes, fun boxes, spine runs, lumpy ramps, flat bars, and handrails—called “kinked hand-jobs” (she’d done her homework) by the incredibly stupid boys who had invented this incredibly stupid pastime.
Vanessa was in fact astonished to discover a cottage industry in the tacky, bowling-alley mentality of skateboarding—an industry that, upon research, proved to have more revenue-producing potential than the entire New Age. And Aaron, she’d assured him, would be her consultant and partner in crime.
They were scheduled to haggle terms this morning. But Aaron had been a no-show. His news was trop passé, at any rate. It was somebody else’s no-show that enraged her.
Vanessa picked up her glass of iced Lillet and took a sip.
Just who the fuck did Sen. Edward Carbury think he was—to tell her they should put their affair “on the back burner until the publicity died down”? That they should avoid even being seen together!
Yeah—like, these murders had anything to do with their relationship! Ned had been only a mediocre real estate lawyer when Vanessa found him, when she had browbeaten her then-husband, Henry Drysdale, into hiring him. Ned’s negotiation—through all the foibles and tangles of the law—of Gryphon Gate, the first gated community completely orchestrated at all levels, had made Vanessa and Henry rich—and had bought Ned Carbury a seat in the United States Senate.
Vanessa threw her Baccarat goblet across the room and watched it smash against the far wall. With great pleasure. Luckily, she had cornered the market on crystal—and that wasn’t all. Never let the bastards get you down.
Then she picked up her cell phone and punched “redial.”
* * *
Camille McClintock watched from her enclosed veranda as the gusts of rain struck the glass panes in horizontal sheets, like a runaway locomotive, car after car. It should have been hypnotic, but the rhythm of wind and water on glass wasn’t lulling her at all. Over and over, with each onslaught, she kept thinking about Lance.
Camille had never believed that the fax they’d received had anything to do with her own long-forgott
en past as “Barbi” the call girl. It had to be something else—a kind of coded message that only Lance would understand. And that was what killed him.
Lance had been behaving strangely, ever since that awful night of confrontation in the club between the “Bambi huggers” and Lance’s organized posse of deer hunters. He’d said something that made her uneasy. Maybe something he had said in the bar: “To bitches everywhere.” Was that it? Or was it something else?
The wind had grown wilder now; Camille even imagined for a moment that she actually heard it howling like a human voice or an animal’s. Good lord!—Roman Gervase wouldn’t be out in this weather, would he? Even though he was crazy as a loon and wilder than a …
And then she got it! She recalled what Lance had said that night in the bar! It seemed like nothing then, but now it came together in a rush, like that wall of water, a deluge. Camille was on her feet—she had to notify the police at once!
She grabbed her cell phone, but the message said the lines were all jammed. So she reached for the house phone—but she found the line had gone dead. Oh God.
It was then that Camille heard the tapping on the French windows. There, just outside in the storm, stood a tall, hooded figure dressed all in black.
* * *
Renée Lynch was depressed. Really depressed. She had known for months that their house was bugged—she’d even tried to hire their neighbor, security expert Martin Herbert, to trace who did it, with a singular lack of success. But Renée had assumed it was due to Jerry’s shenanigans involving the New York Stock Exchange. Now that Anka, their maid, had been brutally murdered in the Sinclair koi pond, Renée realized with an awful shudder that it might well have been due to Jerry’s shenanigans with Anka instead!
It all made sense, now that she thought of it. Why had Anka “accidentally” knocked the phone off the hook whenever she and Jerry had sex? Renée couldn’t count the number of times she’d found the receiver on the floor. Obviously, Anka was signaling someone that she and Jerry were occupied—which meant Renée must be out of the house, too—and the coast was clear. But for what?
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