“You’re far more beautiful than Pau Ricard told me,” Wil said with the seductive tone in his voice that always caused me to melt. I assumed it had the same effect on other women.
“Thank you,” Eileen said, that smoky, sensual flavor in her voice that I’d heard on the phone. “What is your pleasure this evening?”
“I thought it would be interesting to hear everything you know about Joseph Morgan,” Wil said in the same tone of voice as before.
It took Eileen a minute for the words to sink in, at which point she pushed away from the table and started to stand. My hand on her shoulder prevented that, and the barrel of the Mini-Stealth pressed against her ribs froze her. I raised an eyebrow at Wil.
“I think the lady expects to be paid for her time,” I said.
Wil got the hint and held out a payment card.
“Your phone, Miss Desroches?”
With a shaking hand, she pulled it from her purse and held it out in front of her. Wil transferred the money.
I slipped into the chair beside her. “Now that we’ve paid for an hour,” I said, “please tell us about Joseph Morgan.”
“Who are you people?”
“He’s a Chamber investigator, and I’m a woman with a silenced pistol and a bad attitude. Morgan?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Let’s start with your trips to Sierra Leone,” I said. Since I was sitting sort of behind her, I couldn’t see the expression on her face very well, but she stiffened.
“There’s nothing illegal about flying to Africa,” she said.
“No, and nothing illegal about carrying a suitcase full of diamonds when you come home. I’m sure he paid the Chamber fees on the transactions.” She flinched at that. “On the other hand, it’s a damned dangerous thing to do. I would personally use an armored car service. What else did you do for Morgan?”
Eileen talked for two hours. Wil ended up shelling out another two hundred, but I thought he got his money’s worth. As I suspected, Morgan was selling the black-market gems through his own company, but also to others. Not the top-grade stones, but the mass-market stuff. He kept the best for himself. When she mentioned some of the people she made deliveries to, I saw that Wil’s surprise mirrored mine. Morgan did a lot of business with organized crime. She also told us that something had been bothering him for two or three weeks before his death, but she didn’t know what it was.
Chapter 10
I never had any pangs of conscience when doing a hit on corporate executives. They lived like kings of old, while the vast majority of mankind worked long hours just to survive. Those outside the corporate world lived without even the basics of modern society, such as immunizations, electricity, and clean water. Starvation was a daily fear.
In the case of the two feuding restaurant executives, it appeared that taking them out might be considered a public service. It would be difficult to replace either of them with someone more rapacious, greedy, or incompetent. The background checks I ran showed that one was emotionally abusive to his family and employees, while the other was the subject of pedophilia rumors.
I hacked into both corporations’ computer systems and accessed my targets’ schedules. A few spot-checks at different times of the day confirmed those schedules were accurate and helped me to identify the best times and places for taking care of my business. With my research complete, the day after our chat with Eileen Desroches, I took some time off from guarding Nellie to carry out the commissions.
George van der Line lived in a gated compound near Mont Royale and flew to his office in a chauffeured aircar four days a week at seven o’clock in the morning. He disembarked at seven-fifteen on a landing pad for helicopters and aircars on the roof of his office building in downtown Montreal. From there, it took him twelve steps to reach the elevator door. The roof of the skyscraper next door was two stories higher and fifty-two yards away.
At seven o’clock, I walked through the next-door building’s lobby wearing the persona of one of their security guards. The elevator to the roof took twelve minutes. Using my most basic chameleon talent, I blended into the background, becoming invisible. I put my rifle together, set up my bipod, and took aim through the telescope as Van der Line stepped out of his aircar. As he put his foot down on his eighth step, I squeezed the trigger.
I packed up the rifle and took the stairs down two flights, then morphed into a fortyish secretary type and rode the elevator the rest of the way to the lobby.
The metro carried me to Simon de Laurent’s office a few miles to the east. I had a cup of coffee and read a book on my tablet in a shop across the street until eleven-fifty. I went outside as de Laurent came through his building’s front door.
He turned right, and briskly walked two blocks to a bistro that was the antithesis of his own restaurants. I entered the building across the street, smiling at the “Office for Rent” sign next to the front door. The back stairs led to the second floor, then down a long hallway to the vacant office space overlooking the street. I was inside in less than a minute.
The windows didn’t open, but a suction cup and a glass cutter gave me a nice, round hole at the proper height. I sighted the rifle on the front door of the bistro, set an alarm on my phone, then went back to reading my book.
An hour later, the alarm went off. I put my tablet away and sighted the rifle again. Monsieur de Laurent came out the door five minutes later. I waited for him to clear the doorway, then squeezed off a shot.
I exited the building via the back stairs and the door to the alley.
“Do you know anything about a woman named Alysia Capozzi? Or a Geraldine Parker?” Wil asked when he called that afternoon.
“Why?” I asked suspiciously. Alysia was Alonzo Donofrio’s granddaughter, and Alonzo was the head of the largest organized-crime family in Toronto. She had married the grandson of Carmine Capozzi, Alonzo’s counterpart in Montreal. I had done a job or two for old Alonzo, but otherwise, I did my damnedest to stay as far as possible from the mob. Parker had turned up in my research as one of Morgan’s ex-girlfriends. Current rumors had her as a mistress to Benito Capozzi, Carmine’s son and Alysia’s father-in-law.
“I have tails on Eileen and Leslie Desroches,” Wil said. “Leslie just met Alysia Capozzi, Geraldine Parker, and Jacques Savatier for a late lunch. Capozzi and Parker arrived together.”
“Yeah, I know who they are. I went to school with Alysia. We’re talking major high-up mob connections.”
“Savatier doesn’t seem to be at a level that would provide any benefit to the mob,” Wil said.
I thought about it. “I agree. I know that Alonzo Donofrio has better hackers than Savatier could provide, so I assume the Capozzis do, too.” When Alonzo needed a hacker, he called my mom and opened his wallet. If the job was too insignificant for her to bother, she gave it to me.
“So?”
“You know that I’m on the clock when you pump me for information about the way criminals do business, right?”
He chuckled. “I assume that you’re on the clock all the time except when we’re in bed.”
“Oh. I hadn’t considered putting that time on my invoices. I don’t charge you when you take me to dinner, either. Silly me.”
I thought about it. “Well, if Morgan was doing business with any of the criminal families, it wouldn’t be through the women. This sounds like they are either freelancing or acting as conduits for freelancing lower-level mobsters, such as Alysia’s husband.”
“How well do you know Alysia? Were you friends?”
“We’re cordial. I ran in different social circles than Alonzo Donofrio’s granddaughter. On purpose.”
“Well, I really wish I could get a bug planted in the middle of that conversation.”
“Is that a hint? Where are they, and how long have they been there?”
“About fifteen minutes.” He gave me the address. I checked it, and it would take me half an hour to get there.
“Can you create a
problem in the kitchen? Something to delay them?” I turned to Nellie, covering the phone with my hand. “Call Tom. Tell him I have to go out.”
“Sure thing. The only thing I planned on doing this afternoon was taking a bath and getting my nails done,” Nellie responded.
“Rich man’s pet,” I said with mock disgust.
Nellie grinned. “Maybe I’ll order some fancy chocolates and a nice bottle of red wine from room service.”
“Bitch.”
She grinned even wider.
Wil said something I didn’t hear. “Sorry,” I said into the phone, “could you repeat that?”
“I can cut the power for fifteen minutes or so.” Wil said. “Would that help?”
“Perfect.”
I was lucky with trains and arrived at the restaurant half an hour after I hung up the phone. Wearing my fiftyish uber-rich-bitch persona, I waltzed in and insisted on the table near where Savatier dined with the three women. I brushed against Leslie and Savatier in passing, and planted bugs on both of them. I bugged Alysia on my way to the ladies’ room a few minutes later and tagged Parker on the way back.
The menu looked tasty, and I hadn’t had lunch, so I ordered and routed the receipt to my invoice for the Chamber. The bugs were my own, and the output went to my servers in Toronto. I could send anything relevant to Wil later.
Everyone appeared to know each other fairly well. Leslie, of course, would have known Savatier for years. Alysia was a chimera, a congenital condition where twins merged into one baby in the womb. Her hair was black on one side of her head and blonde on the other, her skin a mosaic of lighter and darker patches. She was facing away from me, but I knew she had one blue eye and one brown. She was a pretty girl, but her condition was a bit unsettling if you looked at her too long.
Parker was a mutie, though her mutations weren’t immediately obvious other than her hands. She had only two fingers on each hand, giving her hands the appearance of lobster claws. She also had two-toned skin, but she was a redhead, and both skin tones were so light that makeup hid any variations on her face. That could have been the extent of her abnormalities, but I wouldn’t have bet on it. I looked perfectly normal and I had two very radical mutations.
Savatier’s party lingered over coffee and cordials for quite a while, finally departing in the late afternoon. I had checked out by then and met up with Wil at the Queen Elizabeth.
I was in the process of downloading the conversations to my laptop when Wil said, “It looks as though all of them are headed to Savatier’s apartment.”
I shrugged. “All three of them probably fit into Savatier’s kinks. As soon as I finish downloading all this audio, we can see what else they might be discussing.”
“I wish I could listen in real time,” Wil said.
“As soon as you give me access to one of your computers, I’ll route the feeds there,” I said. “If you’d given me bugs to use, I would have used them, but you didn’t, so I had to use my own.”
He gave me an exasperated look.
I smiled. “Hey, those bugs are yours now. You’ve paid for them.”
He was half-listening to me and also listening to a feed from one of his operatives through an earplug.
“Holy shit!” He ripped the ear plug out and tossed it on the table. Then he picked up a phone and started talking. “Jerome, can you hear me? Jerome? Hansen, are you there? What the hell happened?” He listened intently for a couple of minutes, then pulled the phone away from his ear.
“When Savatier opened the front door to his apartment, a bomb went off. He and all three women were killed.”
Chapter 11
We arrived at Savatier’s building about the same time as the Montreal police. After quick introductions, we took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. Savatier’s apartment was on the fifteenth, but I soon understood why we stopped short.
The twenty-story building had four apartments on each level with two elevator shafts in the center. Stepping off the elevator, we could go either right or left, and then right or left again. Taking two lefts, we came to a hallway filled with debris from the caved-in ceiling in front of an apartment door.
“We’re going to have to get some boards or something to bridge the hole in the floor, so we can get into Savatier’s flat,” Hansen, one of Wil’s men, said. His assignment was following Leslie Desroches.
Picking my way around ceiling tiles and dodging hanging electrical wiring, I crept down the hallway until I stood under the hole. It wasn’t a clean hole, but I could see bent and twisted steel, ragged carpeting, underflooring, and a little light above me, along with a human arm. I kept going to the end of the hall and through the door to the stairwell.
The hallway on the fifteenth floor was darker, with light provided only by the building’s emergency lighting and hand torches held by a few cops. I dug out my own torch and moved down the hallway toward the chaos.
There was far more debris on that floor, with holes in both the ceiling and the floor. The door to Savatier’s apartment was gone, so some light shone through it into the hall.
A man came toward me, and when he got closer, I saw it was Jerome, Wil’s man assigned to follow Savatier.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yeah. I was on the elevator when the bomb blew,” he said. He led me back toward the apartment. “It looks as though it was planted on or in the ceiling, shaped to blow downward. There isn’t much damage on the sixteenth floor, just a large bump in the floor. Looks like opening the door triggered it.”
Twenty feet from the hole in the floor we came to Leslie Desroches’s body. She was almost unrecognizable. The twisted remains of Savatier and Parker lay in the hole in front of the door, and I could see another body past the hole on the other side, presumably Alysia’s.
Something white caught my eye, lying against the wall between Leslie and the hole. I made my way over to it and bent down. Scraping dust and part of a ceiling tile away from it, I picked it up. It was a small bag, identical to those in Morgan’s safe. The label said, “1 carat F, fl.”
I opened it and shined my torch into it. It was full of one carat diamonds.
Jerome, looking over my shoulder, gave a low whistle. Someone else approached us, and Wil’s voice said, “Where did you find that?”
I moved the torch beam to where I found the bag. “Over there.”
He reached for it and I let him have it. “You’re going to check it against your inventory of Morgan’s safe?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
My question was who of the four people scattered through that hallway had carried it. It was closest to Leslie, but that didn’t mean much. The forensics people were going to have a job putting all the body parts together. A woman’s hand with part of a forearm attached lay by itself a few feet from me. It wasn’t Leslie’s.
It took an hour for the cops and forensics to extract the bodies and body parts from the hole in the hall floor, then another half an hour for building-maintenance personnel to build a temporary bridge over the hole so we could get into the apartment. I started for the door when a lady cop in a pantsuit yelled at me.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going? Who are you?”
I held up my Chamber ID and said, “I’m the one who’s going to check for additional bombs. Want to come along?”
Wil grabbed my arm. “I have equipment to do that.” He nodded to two men with metal boxes displaying lights and digital readouts.
“Yeah, and they are certainly welcome to do their thing,” I said, “as long as they stay behind me. Forgive me if I trust myself a little more.”
We had never discussed my complicated relationship with electricity, but I knew he suspected I did something to find safes with electric keypads and open them. He searched my face as though looking for something, then leaned forward and gave me a quick kiss.
“Be careful.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
I didn’t worry about booby traps on the doorway
. The gaping hole and the twisted metal slab that used to be the door gave ample proof that anything there had already detonated.
But as I stepped into the room, I immediately realized that since the electricity was off, finding a bomb with any kind of electrical trigger was going to be easy.
I walked the perimeter of every room, and then crisscrossed each room with my hands raised to try and feel anything in the ceiling. Nothing. But one picture in Savatier’s study gave off an electrical signature. The Chamber guys verified my guess.
“It’s a battery,” one said. “Reads like the kind of battery backup you’d put on a safe.”
“That’s what I was thinking.” I pulled the picture off the wall to reveal the safe. A minute later, I disabled the electric keypad and opened the safe.
Papers, a little jewelry, some gold bars, and a small bag of mixed stones—diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. They looked high quality, but I didn’t inspect them very closely.
Wil showed up at my shoulder as I was going through things, and I handed him the papers and computer chips. “This stuff looks like it might be the most interesting,” I said.
“My bomb detector guys are impressed,” he said.
“Men are easy like that.”
The lady cop came in and held out her ID. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”
I didn’t know if her frown was for me or the general situation. Since I always try to stay on the good side of the police, I smiled at her, holding up my Chamber ID and handing her my business card. “I’m Elizabeth Nelson, of Nelson Security. I do a lot of consulting to the Chamber.”
“Inspector Emilee Gerard, Montreal Police Department,” she said. We looked each other up and down. In my case, I was looking down. Gerard was in her early forties, short, not thin and not chubby, with brown hair and brown eyes. She would’ve made a great thief or undercover cop because nothing about her was notable. She wasn’t beautiful, nor was she plain. My snap impression on first meeting was that she was probably smart and dangerous, otherwise she wouldn’t have reached inspector at her age. Especially, as a woman.
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