“Yes,” I said, nodding, “You just missed the police and the FBI. So far, they don’t know much about who did put the bomb in the car, but they do know how they did it. There was a pressure switch under the passenger seat. The only reason we aren’t both dead is that you walked over to help me with my shoe and the basket triggered the switch instead of my bodyweight. They found the valet. He’d been knocked out in the alley. The FBI left you their card. They want to talk to you.”
Alexander took all of this in with more poise than I ever could. He sighed deeply after a moment and squeezed my hand tightly. Then he looked around the room, taking stock of his surroundings for the first time.
“Where are we? Is it Sunday?”
“Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. And yes, it’s still Sunday as far as I know,” I answered, pulling my now-cracked phone out of my battered clutch purse, “Yep, Sunday. It’s half past seven.”
“Want to go get Easter brunch?” Alexander joked, and I gave him a bemused smirk.
Remembering something important, the smile fell off my face a second later.
“Alexander,” I said guiltily, “I lost one of the beautiful earrings you loaned me. I’m so sorry. I know they must have been very expensive. The blue dress is ruined, too. They gave me these scrubs to wear for now. One of the nurses took pity on me. I asked the police to look for the earring, though, so maybe they will find it…”
Alexander looked at me in horror as I rambled, and my stomach felt suddenly ill. I hoped he wasn’t mad.
“Madison,” he replied, interrupting me in apparent disbelief, “Jesus Christ. I don’t give a shit about the earrings. They were a gift by the way, not a loan. I’ll get you a replacement right away. But that’s not the point. I’m just thankful you’re alright. I would never forgive myself if you’d gotten hurt.”
I exhaled in a combination of relief and disbelief of my own. The earrings and outfit were a gift? I’d had men buy me flowers before on a first date, but never ten carats worth of diamonds. Sometimes the outrageous size of the Durant fortune still shocked me, even after all these years. I should have kept the big-ass ruby necklace, even if it wasn’t my style.
“Madison,” Alexander was saying earnestly to me, “Madison, I owe you a huge apology. I’m so, so sorry this happened. My Chief Operating Officer, Tyler, has been trying to get me to hire a security detail for the past five years. In my own business I’ve made a fair number of personal and professional enemies over the years. A small number of them are violent, bad people. Not to mention the occasional crazy person that hates the Durant family just for existing or stalks us just for kicks. There are plenty of people that could want me dead.”
Alexander looked absolutely furious at himself.
“Like Marco Arturo Chacón or Cesar Arturo Chacón?” I asked him carefully. He looked back at me in confusion.
“Who?” Alexander was either the world’s best liar, or he had no idea. After the night we’d had, I doubted that Alexander was able to lie.
“I don’t know. They were the two men the FBI asked about. I’d never heard of them either,” I replied, shaking my head. I was going to find out.
The door to the left creaked open then. To our mutual surprise, Clara’s tired, worried face peaked through the crack. She smiled broadly when she saw us.
“They’re both awake!” She said to whomever was standing behind her, “And the FBI and police are gone. I told you they couldn’t still be in there. Can we go in now?”
Someone, likely a nurse, must have provided an affirmative answer because the room immediately filled with a veritable parade of relieved friends and family. Somewhere in the chaos of greetings and hugs, I lost my hold on Alexander’s hand. The surprising emptiness in my palm was noticeable for a long time after.
Marco Arturo Chacón.
Cesar Arturo Chacón.
Were they the men who had tried to kill us? I was now determined to find out. Across the room, I could see the same urgent question burning in Alexander’s eyes.
15
Alexander
The forceful banging on the door was not going away, despite my attempts to ignore it. In fact, it was getting louder. Cursing under my breath, I painfully rushed through fastening the brace around my bruised midsection. My half-hour shower had gone a long way to making me feel human again, but my bruised ribs didn’t appreciate all the movement associated with dressing. The brace helped immeasurably with the ribs but putting the damn thing on was time consuming and difficult.
This was what I got for giving the housekeeper holidays off. I stomped through my empty house toward the front door. The house was enormous, so it took a while to get there.
“Keep your fucking panties on!” I shouted at whoever was banging, “I’m coming!”
I swung the door open with the full expectation of yelling at any face that did belong to Madison and had to bite my tongue when the first things I saw were a pair of badges shoved under my nose. FBI. Shit.
“Good morning Mr. Durant,” one of the two youngish men in cheap polyester suits said cheerfully (as if he hadn’t been banging on my door for five fucking minutes), “I’m Agent McKinney and this is Agent Wallace. We’re so glad you’re unharmed. We’d like to speak with you about the incident last night. I promise our intrusion won’t take long. May we come in?”
I had an extreme dislike of law enforcement. Something about the personality type—a disturbing combination of subpar intelligence, the need to wield a firearm, and a pathological desire to intimidate others—it just grated on me. I’d never met any FBI agents before, only police, but I figured they were the same, if slightly smarter and better managed. Unfortunately, law enforcement agents served a societal purpose and were a fact of life. If they could catch the people that tried to kill Madison and me, that’d be just fine. If they turned out to be useless, I’d simply hire someone who could get the job done.
“Sure thing,” I replied dutifully, swallowing my natural distaste, “please come in.”
McKinney, the taller FBI agent, and Wallace, the glasses-wearing FBI agent, shuffled into my house. To their credit, they didn’t gawk as much as I expected. Usually my house receives quite a bit of gawking. Maybe they looked it up beforehand. Or maybe they just had no taste.
Designed by a distinguished European architect with a twelve-syllable name and a waiting list a quarter century long, the house is what you might imagine would happen if a gigantic stack of white LEGOs got married to a Boeing 747 and made a baby with an Olympic sized pool in the basement. My father absolutely hated it, which accounted for probably half of its appeal to me. On the inside, the house was everything that the Durant compound was not: brutally uncluttered, starkly white, and new. The minimalism was the other half of the house’s appeal. The FBI guys followed behind me, and I smirked as I heard their steps slow as they proceeded carefully over the hall’s double-paned glass floor that looked directly into the pool a story below.
“What’s the status of the investigation?” I questioned once we were seated in my office. I felt much more in control in this room, staring at the two men across the wide, white expanse of my desk. The both pulled out foolish looking little notebooks and pens. Who still writes things down on paper? The federal government, that’s who.
“We’re still in the information gathering stage,” McKinney said, “and we’re hoping that you can help us confirm a few things as we work toward understanding what happened. We appreciate your time this morning. We know that you’re a busy man.”
That was a non-committal answer if I’ve ever heard one, but I successfully resisted the urge to call him out on it. This wasn’t one of my negotiations. This was a friendly conversation with the good guys. I reminded myself to be nice.
“Certainly, what would you like to know?”
“Are you familiar with the Chacón brothers? Either Marco Arturo Chacón or Cesar Arturo Chacón of Bogota?” Asked McKinney. Apparently the other one, Wallace, didn’t talk. Maybe he was
just there for moral support?
“I am now,” I replied, “but the first time I heard of them was when Madison mentioned you had asked her about those names this morning. So obviously I looked into it. They’re local crime lords, apparently. Run-of-the-mill drug cartel bosses. You think they did this in response to the proposed petrochemical deal that my company is currently negotiating? I’ve got no other investment interests in Colombia as far as I know.”
McKinney blinked. Had Wallace’s beady eyes grown slightly larger behind his thick glasses? Last time I checked, it was the twenty-first century. Had they not expected me to talk to Madison and then fire up ye olde Google device? I waited for them to respond for about thirty seconds. McKinney and I regarded one another in perfect silence.
“Prior to undertaking your research this morning, were you familiar with the Chacón brothers?” McKinney followed up like a robot after a reboot. Apparently, they weren’t going to answer my questions at all. I gritted my teeth and attempted to remain relaxed and pleasant.
“No, I wasn’t. Like I said, until Madison told me you asked about them, I’d never heard either name before.”
“I see. What is the nature of the petrochemical deal you mentioned?” McKinney asked, now scribbling intensely in his notebook.
I grabbed a stack of printouts from a file cabinet, the most current versions of the draft agreements, and then slid them forward across the table.
“Here are the current draft agreements. In them you will find that my company, Durant Properties International, and my family’s chemical conglomerate, Durant Industries, have formed a joint venture in Colombia. With the approval of the government and the semi-nationalized local partner, Propetronas, I intend to demolish and redevelop the old petrochemical plant outside of Bogota, while Durant Industries builds and operates a new state-of-the-art plant. At the same time, the government has stipulated that we make a number of local investments. Over the past year, we’ve carefully selected dozens of local charitable causes and NGO’s to fund that will offset the disruption to the local economies affected by both projects, intending to prepare, educate, and help those people thrive. We expect to close Wednesday.”
McKinney looked at the half-ream of paper in front of him and back up at me. Then he looked at the stack again. Then me.
“Can you repeat that, only slower this time?” McKinney asked.
I did.
By the time they had both written down every word of my description of the deal, I became increasingly concerned that they may be too bureaucratically anesthetized to understand much of anything. McKinney kept looking at the draft of the deal in front of him like it was a distastefully long homework assignment. My doubt regarding the FBI’s ability to solve this case was strengthening into a conviction.
“Just a few more questions, Mr. Durant,” McKinney said as we both watched Wallace silently stuff the agreement into his briefcase, “if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. I want to help,” I said, putting on my best attempt at a polite tone and smile. McKinney recoiled into my cushy Eames chair. I had probably sneered at him by accident.
I generally avoided bullshitting my emotions. I was really, truly bad at it, and honestly why would I? What you see is what you get with me. I’m rich and powerful enough not to need those skills. I learned early that being falsely pleasant was a waste of time and an invitation to be ignored and abused; it’s much better to be intimidating, obnoxious, and abrasive. Being brutally honest works well in business. I succeeded wildly on my looks with women despite (or perhaps also partially because of) the fact that I didn’t lie and pretend all the time. Unfortunately, this approach didn’t work well with law enforcement at all. Cops tend to take things very personally.
“What is your relationship with Madison Clark?” Questioned McKinney. His eyes had narrowed like he was onto something. What a nitwit.
“She’s the lawyer representing our joint venture on the humanitarian aspects of the investment and a family friend,” I replied smoothly. I smiled at him. Ask me if I’m sleeping with her, I urged in my mind. I was more than happy to announce that I most definitely was.
“I understand she just returned from several months overseas. She was in Haiti according to her immigration records. Do you have any reason to believe she might have some involvement with the Chacón brothers?” McKinney fished. If he was just trying to piss me off, it wasn’t working.
“Hardly. Madison is the biggest rule-follower there is. I’ve known her since we were kids, and trust me, no one is a bigger bleeding-heart idealist and humanitarian. She’s been in Haiti working for a charity. She could make Mother Theresa look like a grasping, greedy bitch,” I said, smirking at the thought of Madison being at all involved in something criminal. She would probably lecture all the other criminals until they just gave up out of frustration.
“One last question, Mr. Durant,” Wallace said, speaking up for the first time in this interview. His voice was deeper than I would have expected from the looks of him. In fact, he was older than I’d realized at first. “Have you had any arrests since your assault conviction eleven years ago?”
You could have heard a pin drop in my office. Wallace, who I now suspected was the smart one and pulling the strings behind the glorified puppet named McKinney, watched me impassively from behind his glasses. Yes, I realized, Wallace was definitely the one in charge.
The atmosphere in the room shifted in a silent, subtle but important way as I recognized his influence and he acknowledged that recognition with a slight dip of his head. McKinney sat next to him like a mannequin, oblivious. Wallace probably put McKinney in the lead on purpose, perhaps knowing that his robotic questioning would piss me off. I hated being played.
“No, Agent Wallace,” I spit out, “I have not. Nor does that have anything to do with what happened last night.”
“Of course,” Wallace said with a toothy smile, “Well, we appreciate your time. Here’s my card if you can think of anything else that might help us. Someone will be in touch as soon as possible. We’ll get started on understanding this deal right away. From our connections abroad, we believe that the Chacón brothers have significant connections in the US through various cartel alliances. We apprehended the car bomber from last night. It was actually the valet himself, but he’s just a useless thug hired to do the job. I suspect that the Chacón brothers are very unhappy that their operations in the Bogota petrochemicals plant may soon come to an end, and they are looking to prevent disruption to their operations. If you have security to protect yourself and the other parties to the deal, I suggest you mobilize them. Ordinarily we’d provide protection, but I suspect you have much better resources than we do. If you don’t, I can have local law enforcement assign a detail.”
“No, that won’t be necessary,” I grate out angrily, annoyed that I’d just been subjected to dumbass McKinney for twenty minutes when five with Wallace would have sufficed, “I’ll make arrangements immediately.”
“Excellent. Once again, thank you for your time. Please be careful over the next few days, Mr. Durant. I suspect that you, and possibly also Ms. Clark, could continue to be targets. Oh, and have a Happy Easter.”
16
Madison
Elena barged in right after I wrapped the towel around myself and stepped out of the shower, startling the living daylights out of me.
“Siéntate ahí,” she ordered, pointing at the bed and waiting for me to sit down with crossed arms. She was armed with a comically large assortment of ointments, bandages, and an expression that said clearly: “Don’t even try and stop me”.
“Elena!” I exclaimed, wrapping the towel as tightly as possible and attempting a dignified expression while naked and dripping wet, “Elena, I don’t need to be taken care of like a child. I can do the bandages myself. Really. You shouldn’t even be here. It’s Easter Sunday.”
Elena just stood there and pointed at the bed, waiting and tapping her foot dramatically. There was no stopping h
er and it was foolish to pretend otherwise. I sat down on the bed, sopping wet and annoyed.
A moment later my mom arrived, carrying a tray with orange juice and some toast. She smiled sweetly at me.
“Hi mom,” I said from my position posed on the bed like a doll. Elena expertly flushed each long scrape wound on my forearms with saline and then applied that stinging antibacterial stuff. I was still surprised that a few scrapes were all I ended up with. I could have lost my arms entirely. Or my life.
“Hi sweetheart!” My mom said, swooping in to kiss the top of my head, “Are you feeling better after the shower? I bet it feels good to be clean.”
The ten minutes in the shower were the only short minutes I’d had to myself in hours. It was absolutely transcendental. And much too short. I wondered vaguely if Alexander had to deal with this much attention at his house today too. I kept finding myself thinking about him, when what I really should have been thinking about was who wanted me dead. Or the deal. The deal that we would start face-to-face negotiations on tomorrow.
“Yes, thanks,” I said, attempting to focus on the present moment, “Although what I really want is to go to sleep.”
“Yes,” Elena interjected, “you need to sleep after I finish bandaging and you get something to eat. You need to rest for a long time. You’ve been up all night.”
My mom nodded sagely in agreement. It was odd to my friends growing up that I seemed to have two mother figures, but it never felt weird to me. I mean my mom was my mother in all the normal mother ways, but Elena was always there, too, protecting and caring for me in her own way. She wasn’t motherly in the traditional sense, but I knew she loved me.
“You should have gotten stiches,” Elena said as she smeared some kind of goo on my skin, “some of these are deep.”
“You should go to the doctor tomorrow, Madison,” My mother added, “I know you’re busy with the deal, but your health comes first. Just go get those scrapes checked out.”
Bleeding Heart (Scions of Sin Book 1) Page 9
