Ten minutes later, he eased the Land Rover into the garage and went directly to the boathouse. His Skeeter FX-21 had been idle since October, but one phone call to his longtime caretaker, Tom Messner, and the sleek twenty-one-foot bass boat was ready for the season. He opened the cooler Tom had stowed on board. Inside were the roast beef sandwiches, thermos of coffee, and cigars he’d requested, along with something the eighth-grade-educated Messner hardly ever left: a handwritten note.
Dear Mr. Bassett. Sorry to here about your bother Leo. From, Tom.
“My bother?” Max said, laughing out loud. “Good news, Tom. My bother Leo won’t be bothering me anymore.”
Max turned over the Skeeter and piloted it slowly toward the center of the lake. He reflected on what had happened since he’d last been on the boat.
It started six months ago at one of Leo’s overpriced vanity parties. As soon as Sonia arrived with Jeremy Nevins in tow, Max recognized the type: a pretty-faced sleazebag who would fuck anyone who could get him close to the rich and powerful. Max said a cold hello and watched as Jeremy’s eyes darted hungrily to Max’s rose gold and diamond Audemars Piguet watch. Pretty and greedy, Max noted.
Leo, of course, couldn’t stop drooling over the boy. That night, the brothers had their usual screaming match over franchising the Bassett name. It ended with Leo storming out, shrieking, “Over my dead body.”
So be it, Max decided. The next day he invited Jeremy to lunch.
“Let me cut to the chase,” Max said as soon as the drinks had been served. “My brother has a crush on you. I’d like you to ask him out.”
“Why doesn’t he ask me himself?” the young cocksman said, sipping a Kir Royale.
“He’s not stupid. You’re thirty years younger and totally out of his league.”
“True. Then why would I go out with him if you ask me?”
“Because,” Max said, removing the eighty-thousand-dollar watch from his wrist and sliding it across the table, “I think you appreciate the finer things in life, and you’ll do what it takes to get them.”
Maxwell Bassett had stalked elephants in Africa, rhinos in Namibia, and crocs along the Nile, so baiting the trap for a rat was easy. Jeremy’s hand trembled as he picked up the watch.
After that it was a simple game of raising the stakes. It all went flawlessly until Leo had a hissy fit and bailed out of the limo, and Jeremy’s bungling minions shot the wrong person. But Max adapted, and on Thursday night, it all fell into place in Leo’s kitchen. There was only one last loose end: find the cultured crystal necklace he had crafted before the cops did.
And then, out of the blue, it found him. An email had arrived last night with a picture of the fake, the words For Sale, and a phone number.
He called. The seller was none other than Annie Ryder. Negotiating with her dim-witted son would have been easy: agree to any price, and as soon as Max had the necklace in his hands, he’d pay Teddy off with a single bullet. But Jeremy had clued him in on the old con woman. She was too smart to believe that Max would roll over without bargaining. He’d have to haggle, make her think she was working for the money, and finally let her win.
All he needed was a little patience. And a second bullet.
He killed the engine midlake and the boat drifted to a stop. The NorCross HawkEye depth finder on the dash told him it was fifty-nine feet to the bottom. Deep enough. Teddy and Annie Ryder would be at the house at two p.m. By nightfall, they’d be at the bottom of Mohegan Lake, their feet weighted and their stomachs slit to keep the gases from letting them float to the surface.
A few days after that, the cops would release Leo’s body, and Max would pose solemn-faced and grief-stricken for the press at his funeral. After that he’d sign the contract with Precio Mundo, and his first design would be a tribute to his dear departed brother.
He lit one of the cigars Tom had left, sat back, and soaked up the April sunshine. The hunt was almost over.
CHAPTER 69
In an alternate universe, Annie Ryder decided, she and Max Bassett would have made a great team. He was a master at forging high-end jewelry, and she…hell, she was a legend.
They could have made millions, but she’d have dropped him like a bad check the minute the shooting started. She could deal with the big-game-hunter shit. It was a dick thing. But killing Elena Travers—that was a deal breaker. Bassett didn’t pull the trigger, but he’d hired Raymond to do his dirty work, and that left Teddy facing an accessory-to-murder rap.
The Partner That Might Have Been was now her sworn enemy, and Annie Ryder was on her way to settle the score.
“This guy’s driveway is like a hockey rink,” Teddy said as he navigated the beat-up Chevy van down a stretch of icy road leading to Bassett’s house.
“Just drive slow,” Annie said as she caught sight of a security camera on a tree. “And smile: we’re on TV.”
Teddy, simple boy that he was, slowed down and smiled.
“Remember: no talking,” Annie reminded Teddy after he’d parked the van and they were walking toward the house.
Teddy drew an imaginary zipper across his lips, and Annie rang the bell. Max Bassett opened the door and patted Teddy down.
“He’s clean,” Max said, turning to Annie. “How about you?”
“I don’t believe in guns,” she said, “and unless you have a female security officer, you’re not laying a finger on me.”
Max didn’t care if she had an arsenal under her red and black Rutgers sweatshirt. She’d be dead before she could get off a shot.
“We can talk in my den,” Max said, leading them down a hallway to a thick slab of Makassar ebony that he’d cut himself in an Indonesian jungle. He tapped a code into a keypad and the ebony door swung open.
They entered, and Annie heard the electronic click as the door shut. Architecturally, she thought, the room was magnificent. A stone fireplace soared to the roof, intersecting a hand-hewn wooden balcony that was bathed in soft light. But the entire space was awash in death. A snarling white tiger frozen midleap took center stage, surrounded by dozens of other stuffed carcasses, horns, skins, and mounted heads—a lifetime of trophies collected by a man whose passion was to kill other living creatures.
She and Teddy settled onto a zebra-skin sofa while Max took a seat behind an ivory-trimmed leather desk. “How much do you want?” he said.
“The necklace was insured for eight million,” Annie said.
“That one was recovered. By now you must have realized that the one you have is a relatively worthless fake.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Annie said, smiling. “It’s an original Max Bassett, so it’s far from worthless.”
“You flatter me, madam, which I’m sure is your intent. However, even with my name attached, it would only be worth a hundred thousand, tops.”
“And why would I take a hundred grand when the insurance company is offering a reward of a quarter of a million?”
Max’s jaw tightened. “I hate to break it to you, but the reward has been off the table ever since the necklace was recovered.”
“And I hate to break it to you, but the necklace they recovered was the one you planted on Jeremy after you killed him. The reward is for the one that was ripped off Elena’s neck. The stones may be fake, but put it under a microscope, and you’ll find some very real traces of Elena Travers’s blood, skin, and DNA. Surely that’s worth more than a hundred thousand dollars to you—especially now that you’re about to enter into holy matrimony with the big boys at Precio Mundo.”
Max forced a smile. “You do your homework.”
“That’s what career criminals do, Mr. Bassett. You know what your problem is? You have an evil soul and a black heart. What you lack is a criminal mind. You paid Raymond to kill Elena, and because of your stupid thinking, my son is wanted as an accessory to murder. So don’t expect to get off cheap.”
Max bolted from his chair. “I have three million dollars in my safe. You produce the necklace, and I’ll
give you the cash, but let’s get one thing clear. I did not pay Davis to kill Elena. What happened was an accident. Leo and I were working an insurance scam, and it went bad.”
“And that, sir, is why I never play with guns,” Annie said. “When my scams go sour, nobody dies.”
“Ma.” It was Teddy. “Let’s go. We got enough.”
Annie smacked the back of his head. “What did I tell you about talking?”
“Don’t do it. But I didn’t say anything bad. I just said let’s go.”
No, Max thought. You said, “Let’s go. We got enough,” and Mama Bear got upset.
“Three million—cash,” Annie said. “Pack it up. Teddy and I will get the necklace.”
You do that, Max thought. You bring me the necklace, and we’ll see who looks stupid when I put a bullet through your—
And in that instant, Max Bassett realized he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. He’d been a hunter since he was old enough to hold a bow and arrow. But long before he learned to shoot, his father had taught him how a hunter thinks.
It’s not about who’s faster or stronger. It’s about who’s smarter. Hunting is a test of wits, Max. They’re not dumb animals. They’re cunning. So never, ever underestimate the intelligence of your prey.
Annie Ryder was extremely cunning. She was far too smart to give him the necklace and expect to walk away with the money. She hadn’t come for the money. She had come for the confession that she had just goaded out of him.
And her son, as dumb as he was, knew they had gotten what they had come for. Only instead of putting on a high-stakes poker face the way his mother could, Teddy had blurted out, “Let’s go. We got enough.”
The old woman and her son weren’t the prey. They were the bait. And Max wasn’t the hunter. He was the hunted.
CHAPTER 70
“We got him,” Kylie said as soon as Max Bassett admitted that Elena’s murder was an insurance scam gone bad.
“We’ve only got him on tape,” I said. “I’ll feel better when we have him in cuffs.”
Kylie and I were in the back of Teddy Ryder’s van, listening to the dialogue inside Bassett’s lake house. A few hours earlier, we had made a deal with the devil. In this case, Satan looked like a sweet old lady who had just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting, but she had the negotiating skills of a Mafia underboss.
Annie knew we didn’t have enough hard evidence to prosecute Bassett, so she had offered to help us take him down. All she wanted was immunity for her son. She may as well have asked that the city throw him a ticker-tape parade. Senior ADA Mick Wilson was not in the habit of dropping accessory-to-murder charges, but in this case, he didn’t blink.
Locking up a patsy like Teddy Ryder would barely register as a blip on the media Richter scale, but indicting a high-profile New Yorker like Max Bassett would reverb around the world. Mick was happy to trade the little fish for the big one, and I’m sure that as soon as he gave us the green light, he started daydreaming about who would play him in the movie.
All Kylie and I had to do was arrest Bassett on a charge that would stick. And we only had three hours to pull the entire operation together. Annie had already agreed to a two p.m. meeting with Bassett, and asking him for more time would push the needle on his trust meter into the red.
Our first challenge was finding a command vehicle. The department has a lot of tricked-out vans for stakeouts and surveillance, but since this one had to look like it belonged to Teddy, we pulled a 1996 four-wheel-drive Chevy Astro out of the impound lot and had the techs slap together a sound system. We had no video, but on the plus side, we did have heat and brakes.
Body wires have gotten smaller over time, but they’re still easy to detect if the informant gets frisked. So wiring Teddy was out. But Annie assured us that Bassett wouldn’t touch her. “He’ll never suspect that I cut a deal with the cops,” she told us. “Hell, I can’t believe it myself.”
The ground rules were simple. Go in, get a confession, and get out.
“You’ll need a safe word,” Kylie said. “If anything goes wrong, just say it once, and we’ll come running.”
“How about help?” Teddy said.
“Smart thinking, kiddo,” Annie told her son. As soon as he was out of earshot, she changed the safe word to hot chocolate.
The four of us piled into the junker, and by one thirty we were in a parking lot behind an Audi dealership on Main Street in Mohegan Lake, waiting to rendezvous with our backup, an ESU entry team from the Bronx.
At 1:50, the team leader radioed us with the bad news. “We hit a deer on the Taconic. Two of our guys are on the way to the ER, and the truck is out of service until the motor pool picks Bambi out of the fan housing. I radioed dispatch, and they can have another unit in place by sixteen hundred hours.”
Annie shook her head. “No. We’ve got to go now.”
“We can’t,” I said. “The man’s got enough firepower to defend the Alamo. We’re waiting for backup.”
“Then you can wait for them without me. If I call a mark ten minutes before showtime and try to put him on hold for two hours, he’s going to know something’s going down. Just get me there on time, let me do what I have to do, and once I’m out, you can wait as long as you want before you storm the castle.”
“Annie…”
“I’m serious, Detective. I talked to the man on the phone last night. He’s squirrelly enough as it is. Either we go now or the deal is off.”
She was bluffing. She’d do anything to keep her kid out of jail. But I couldn’t take the chance. I looked at Kylie. It was easy to figure where her head was at.
“Let’s roll,” she said, and Teddy pulled the van out of the parking lot for the final three-mile drive to Bassett’s house.
Less than twenty minutes later, Annie had delivered. She’d wormed a confession out of Bassett. Now all we had to do was wait for our two informants to get out of the house.
And then Teddy, who had been told not to talk, talked. “We got enough,” he said.
“Did Teddy just tell Bassett that they got the confession they came for?” Kylie said.
“It sounded that way to me,” I said. “But we know what he means. The question is, will Bassett pick up on it?”
We waited for Annie to ask Bassett if he could make her a cup of hot chocolate, but she didn’t. And then she said, “Teddy and I will get the necklace.”
“They’re coming out,” Kylie said. “You ready?”
“We’re not waiting for backup, are we?” I said.
“Too risky. If she doesn’t come back right away, he’ll know we’re out here, and we’ll lose the element of surprise. As soon as she and Teddy are safe, you cover the back, I’ll go in the front, and we’ll take him down.”
We heard footsteps over the wire as Annie and Teddy walked through the house. As soon as the front door opened, the signal started to break up.
“Fabric rubbing against the mic,” Kylie said. “It’s freezing out there. She’s probably hugging her arms to her chest.”
The static continued, and then the signal dropped. “Lost her,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kylie said. “She and Teddy are on their way back to the van, and Bassett is probably sitting in his living room with a loaded elephant gun, waiting to get his hands on the—”
The impact was bone-jarring. It felt like the van had been hit by a train. We found out later it was a Land Rover, which is almost as lethal.
The side panel caved in, and the van slid across the frozen ground. Neither Kylie nor I had been braced for the collision, and we both wound up on the hard metal floor.
Before I could get my bearings, I heard an engine roaring, bearing down on us hard. The second crash was a bigger jolt than the first. The van flipped over, teetered, and then rolled downhill, flipping over one more time, and another, and another, until something big—a tree, probably—broke our descent.
If it hadn’t been for a wall-mounted safety bar, I’d ha
ve been thrown around like a rag doll in a washing machine. Even so, my left shoulder and my right knee took a pummeling.
Kylie wasn’t as lucky. She was holding on to the back of the driver’s seat, a glazed look in her eyes, blood streaming down her face.
“We should have waited for backup,” she said.
CHAPTER 71
As soon as Max realized that the Ryders were there for his confession and not for the money, he reached behind his back for his gun, held it inches from Annie’s head, and put his index finger to his lips.
Slow-witted as he was, Teddy got the message. He froze.
Max carefully lifted the bottom of Annie’s sweatshirt. No wonder the old crone didn’t want to be patted down. She was wired.
He turned the gun on Teddy and whispered in Annie’s ear, “How many cops in the van?”
She held up two fingers.
Maxwell Bassett was a doomsday prepper—a lifelong survivalist. For decades he’d been prepared for that apocalyptic day when he would have to run from life as he knew it. In all his Armageddon scenarios, he pictured a foreign invasion, a catastrophic natural disaster, or a total societal collapse. Never in his wildest fantasies could he have imagined that he’d be taken down by a conniving old hag and her idiot son.
It didn’t matter. He was ready. With the gun trained on them, he went to a closet and pulled out a timeworn, well-traveled Rufiji Safari bag. It was filled with everything he’d need to escape to the fortress he’d built thirty years ago in the middle of the British Columbian wilderness.
He’d have liked to put a bullet through Teddy’s empty skull, but the need for silence trumped the desire for payback.
“Now you just sit here and be a good boy,” he whispered in Teddy’s ear. “If you’re not, you know what’s going to happen to your mother, don’t you?”
Teddy nodded, and then sat stone-faced as Bassett led Annie out of the room and closed the door behind them.
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