Her Last Breath

by Hilary Davidson

  “Deirdre.” He smiled at me and waved, setting the paperback aside.

  “Hi,” I said, sitting down.

  “I thought this would be convenient for you, since you’re coming in on the 7 train.”

  There was an awkward silence between us while I mentally filed through our minimal exchanges. “How do you know I live in Queens? And how did you get my number?”

  “Caroline told me.” He said it as if it were obvious.

  “Why would she?”

  “Because she figured we’d be natural allies, I guess,” Ben said.

  “Then why didn’t she give me your contact info?” As I asked the question, I thought of the photo she’d sent me. Aside from letting me know Ben existed, it hadn’t given me much.

  “I bet she meant to. Caroline had a lot to deal with.”

  “My sister never mentioned you to me. What was going on between you two?”

  There was a startled silence. “Wow. Your sister always said you were direct,” Ben said. “She wasn’t kidding.”

  I stared at him, refusing to fill the silence. He caved first, sort of.

  “Just because someone asks you a question doesn’t mean you have to answer it.” Ben smiled at me, and it felt like he was used to getting his way with that grin. “Not that I’d want my interview subjects to realize that.”

  “I know Caro and Theo were living separate lives. I’m not judging you.”

  “Thanks for your permission.”

  I’d been putting down Ben’s reaction the day before to the fact I’d surprised him at his building, but I was starting to think he was just an asshole. At that moment, a waiter homed in. Ben ordered black coffee—predictably—and I asked for water. I should’ve specified “tap” because the waiter returned quickly with a small bottle of Pellegrino.

  “I wanted to meet you because I need information,” I said. “Did Caro send you a letter to read after she died?”

  “I can’t talk about that.”

  I pulled up the image of the message and held it up. If I fail, you have to do it. I am putting all of my faith and trust in you. My son’s future depends on it.

  The color drained out of his face. He wasn’t so cocky now. “Where did she send that?”

  “It’s to this random-sounding account. Is that you?”

  He stared at it blankly. “Yeah. I have a bunch of burner accounts for sources.”

  “But you hadn’t seen the message?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t check them that often. But that message was for me.”

  X, she had called him. I guess that meant ex, which I wasn’t even sure was accurate. “What does it mean? What did Caro want you to do?”

  “I can’t share that.”

  “You can tell me or you can tell the cops.” I didn’t know when I’d become a cheerleader for the NYPD, first asking Theo’s father to talk to them and now offering to sic them on Ben. I just didn’t have anything else to threaten him with.

  “Look, Deirdre, I would love to be able to confide in you,” Ben said. “But I don’t know whose side you’re on.”

  “I’m on Caro’s side,” I said. “I don’t care about anything else.”

  “Show me the message she sent you.”

  It was my turn to be affronted. “Excuse me?”

  “If she sent me a message, she sent one to you,” Ben said. “I need to see it.”

  Reluctantly, I pulled it up on my phone. He read it silently, nodding to himself.

  “So she did tell you,” he said. “That’s good. Otherwise, you wouldn’t believe me about Theo.”

  “What did Caro tell you?”

  Ben raised an eyebrow. “She never described the torture her husband put her through? The shit that was happening at her house?”

  “Like what?”

  “Did she ever mention how she had no privacy? How things would move from room to room, how her private possessions would be rearranged?”

  “I only heard a little about it.”

  “Caroline was afraid to tell anyone,” Ben said. “It made her sound crazy. Claiming that someone moved your shoes to the wrong shoebox makes you sound psycho. But that’s by design.”

  “By design?” I repeated. “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s psychological warfare,” Ben said. “It’s like death by a thousand cuts. It was a tactic perfected by the Stasi—the secret police—in East Germany. They sent officers to move things around in dissidents’ homes when they weren’t there. It was meant to disorient them, and it was a perfect way to distance them from people they cared about. Because when they told people close to them, it was dismissed as lunacy and paranoia.”

  “Let me get this straight. They just moved stuff? They didn’t take things?”

  “Right. Taking things gives you a legitimate crime to report. Saying a ring is missing doesn’t make you cuckoo. But saying someone came into your home and rearranged your jewelry box . . . well, how would you tell anybody that with a straight face?”

  “They’d think you did it yourself and forgot.” There was an ugly logic to what he was saying.

  “I think she was embarrassed to tell people what was happening,” Ben said. “It felt like the ground beneath her feet wasn’t steady.”

  “Was Caro meeting you the morning she died?”

  “Yes. She was supposed to drop something off for me.”

  “A memory card?”

  “How the hell did you know that?”

  “When I went to the police, they showed me a list of what was on my sister when she died,” I said. “There was a memory card zipped into the pocket of her leggings.”

  “I was supposed to pick it up from her,” Ben said. “But Theo came to the house early that morning and freaked Caroline out. He overheard her talking to me on the phone—I don’t know how much he heard, but Caroline was terrified. He wasn’t supposed to get back from his trip for another day. She texted me that she’d come down to my building, even though she wasn’t feeling well. She’d been having heart palpitations. That bastard killed her.”

  “You were going to her house?”

  “A couple of blocks away. Caroline didn’t want the in-laws knowing.” Ben stared into the distance, his jaw tight. “Theo showing up changed everything.”

  “What was on the memory card?”

  “Evidence,” Ben said.

  I could feel my own heart rattling the cage of my chest. “Evidence of what?”

  “Theo is a criminal,” Ben said. “The entire Thraxton family is a criminal organization. Caroline wanted me to be able to prove it.”

  CHAPTER 24

  DEIRDRE

  Ben stared at me, clearly eager for my reaction. I took a sip of water.

  “Is this about them keeping two sets of books?” I asked.

  His jaw dropped in open astonishment. “Caroline said she only told Jude and me. How do you know about it?”

  “Jude knows?” I countered. My heart dropped to the concrete floor of the outdoor café and bounced back, bruised.

  “How do you know?” he repeated.

  “Caro sent me a memory card with hundreds of photos. Last night, I discovered there were spreadsheets on it too.”

  “I guess that was her insurance policy,” Ben mused.

  “I don’t understand why the Thraxtons have two sets of books.”

  “They’re money launderers,” Ben said. “They have a long history with crime. That story about Theodore Senior winning his first big hotel in a poker game is bullshit. He was involved with criminals, and they needed a fresh face to run their scam.”

  “Was that what you meant last night? When you said what my sister was up to was illegal?”

  He nodded. “She knew what the Thraxtons were doing, and she didn’t leave.”

  I wanted to defend Caro. She was an honest person, and I knew she devoted herself to helping people. Jude had mentioned all the money my sister had given Diotima, and it wasn’t the only charity. But I felt bile rise in my throat a
s I contemplated Caro’s awareness of her in-laws’ criminal ventures. I could hear her voice when I’d called her in a panic about the letter our mother had written. Ignore it. Focus on your own life. Maybe it wasn’t fair of me to think about that—Caro had been all of twenty when she’d said those words to me—but I knew my sister was willing to turn a blind eye to issues that didn’t concern her.

  I took a drink. “I don’t understand the scam.”

  “Hotels are a shady business,” Ben said. “Their clients can be from anywhere in the world, and you can’t prove they exist. They play it like every room is full, and everyone’s ordering room service and flowers and getting massages. You can launder millions through one hotel that way.”

  I swallowed hard. Going over the spreadsheets with Reagan, we’d assumed the lowball number was fake and that the Thraxtons were hiding money from the tax man. It hadn’t occurred to us that they’d fake the profits.

  “How long have they been doing this?”

  “Years. When I expose them, Theo’s going to jail.”

  “But Theo’s the one who left the family business,” I pointed out. “How’s he responsible?”

  Ben’s mouth tightened in a snarl, like he was ready to curse me out. “Are you on his side?”

  “Of course not. But I don’t understand how this implicates Theo. It’s the rest of his family who’d go to jail.”

  “Fuck the Thraxtons,” Ben said, spitting out their name contemptuously. “They think they’re better than everyone else, but they’re just a bunch of crooks.”

  I sat there, trying to make sense of it. “Ben, my sister wrote me a message saying that her husband had murdered someone else. She was afraid he’d do the same thing to her.”

  “He did.”

  “Then why are you obsessing about the business? Because that doesn’t touch Theo.”

  “What’s your big idea?” He kicked at a pigeon, who stood its ground and gave him a dirty look.

  “Theo killed a woman—girlfriend, wife, whatever you want to call her—in Berlin when he was a student there. His father admitted it to me.”

  “Caroline told me about it. She couldn’t even get the woman’s name. It’s a dead end.”

  “No, it’s not,” I insisted. “His father told me enough details. The woman used different names, including Mirelle and Marianne. She was stabbed to death in their apartment in Berlin. Theo was young at the time—he was in college. His father whisked him out of the country and into rehab, and the police thought the woman died in a break-in over drugs and cash.”

  “You call that enough details? I can see why you’re not a journalist.”

  “And I can see why you pull this lone-wolf act. No one could stand working with you for more than five minutes. But for Caro’s sake, I’m going to try. You’re supposed to be a journalist. Dig into the story of this dead woman.”

  Ben shook his head. “Caroline couldn’t believe the old man covered everything up for his son.”

  “Why does no one ever focus on the woman who died?” I asked. “Everyone acts like she’s this nonentity, that her death doesn’t matter except for what it did to Theo.”

  “Then you look into it.”

  “I don’t even know where to start!”

  “Do what you’re doing now. Ask questions. Shake some trees and see what falls out.” He shrugged. “People think journalism is about writing. It’s not. It’s about being persistent.”

  I didn’t speak German or have the option of flying off to Berlin. I didn’t even have a passport. The idea that I was going to solve this cold case from my dungeon room in Queens seemed insane. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to keep researching the story Caroline wanted me to work on,” he said. “If you want to help, give me the memory card.”

  “I’ll email you the spreadsheets,” I said grudgingly.

  The waiter brought our bill, and Ben paid it. I didn’t object because I couldn’t pay for my Pellegrino with protein bars.

  “You said before that Theo killed Caro,” I said. “But I don’t understand what he did, besides showing up at the house.”

  “He was terrorizing her.”

  “Caro ran down to your neighborhood,” I said, thinking out loud.

  “All she had to do was give the memory card to my doorman,” Ben said.

  “But she didn’t. She still had it.” Caro had gone into the park instead of Ben’s building. Why? What had drawn her there?

  “Right.” Ben was stock still, as if frozen. “What are you saying?”

  “Don’t you think that’s weird?” I asked. “I mean, she ran all the way south, over a mile, and then something keeps her from going a couple more yards to give you the card?”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  There had to be a reason Caro detoured into the park. “What if someone followed her?”

  “Theo had been at the house,” Ben mused. “He could’ve waited for her.”

  Another thought had crossed my mind. Caro’s father-in-law had watched Theo going into and out of the house. That meant he could’ve seen my sister leave for her run. Theodore’s involvement was an unlikely possibility. But if Caro was giving a journalist information about his company’s ongoing fraud, who knew what he’d do?

  “It didn’t have to be Theo,” I said. “Her phone wasn’t on her when she died. If someone else saw her messages or call log, they’d figure out she was meeting you.”

  “No one knew,” Ben said, standing. He picked up his book.

  “Anyone who has access to her phone knows.”

  “Caroline used a burner,” Ben said. “She knew enough to do that.”

  He strode off before I could ask him anything else. My rule-following good-girl sister used burner phones? How would she even know where to get one? The feisty pigeon hopped up on the chair Ben had vacated.

  “Did any of that make sense to you?” I asked it. “Because I am very confused.”

  CHAPTER 25

  THEO

  The Thraxton hotel in Berlin was on Museum Island, a small patch of land sitting in the middle of the river Spree. It was as far east from the Brandenburg Gate as the Tiergarten’s Victory Column was west, and I took a taxi to get there quickly. That provided an accidental sightseeing tour of the grand boulevard of Unter den Linden, with its neoclassical opera house and the imposing Humboldt University. This was a deviation from my plan to walk the streets I’d known as a student in Berlin, because I’d rarely visited this area in those days. But as I’d stared at my old apartment building, the certainty that another person had been in the room had only grown. I didn’t think it was my sister; I couldn’t remember seeing Juliet until I was carried onto the private plane that took me to rehab. Someone else had carried me onto the plane; Juliet was already there. I’d gotten a decent look at the man’s face as he’d strapped me into a seat. It hadn’t been Klaus, with his distinctive shock of white hair and huge belly. It was a man I couldn’t remember ever seeing before.

  The taxi deposited me beside the Lustgarten—a name I’d snickered at as a student; it translated as “Pleasure Garden”—which was across from the cathedral. If I’d been in the city as a tourist, I would’ve loved nothing more than to head north. That way lay the Pergamon Museum with its Babylonian, Assyrian, and Roman treasures; the Neues—or New—Museum, with its bounty from Egypt and Troy; and the smaller Bode Museum, with its Byzantine art and assortment of curious collections. But I took a deep breath and headed south.

  The Thraxton International property was a grand fantasy of a building that had its own moat, as if it were a castle. It was largely glass and metal—like all of my family’s hotels—but with baroque touches that included steel gargoyles with gleaming fangs.

  Inside, I asked at the desk for the manager. It was a happy surprise when Pierre Dorval appeared, dressed in a sharp navy suit, and kissed me on the cheek. He was in his midforties and one of the most casually elegant humans I knew, with a mane of curly chestnut h
air that fanned out like a halo. “I’m sorry, I know people hate that since the pandemic. But I am—what do you Americans call it—a hugger!”

  “It’s good to see you,” I said, meaning it. “I had no idea you were in Berlin now.” Pierre had been managing the Thraxton hotel in Paris when I’d left the company.

  “The opportunity came up a year ago, and I grabbed it,” Pierre said. “My husband is from Copenhagen, so he was thrilled. I am—what do you call it—‘living the dream.’ What brings you to Berlin?” He clapped his hand over his mouth. “Oh, Theo, I just remembered Caroline. I am so very sorry. She was the most wonderful person. The news does not feel real yet.”

  “It’s been an awful time.”

  “How is your little boy? He must be four now?”

  “Almost. It’s been hardest of all for him.” I shifted gears quickly. “That’s why I’m here, actually. I was a student in Berlin twelve years ago. I wanted to reconnect with some people I knew then, people who worked here. I’m embarrassed to say I can’t remember their names. Could I see the personnel files?”

  “Of course!” Pierre answered. He turned and spoke in rapid-fire German to the desk staff. I couldn’t follow what he was saying very well, except that some files were digitized and some were on paper. One of the desk staff headed to the back.

  “Have you eaten?” Pierre asked me.

  “No.” I’d forgotten about food. The last meal I’d had was the boxed breakfast on the plane. “But I’m in a hurry.”

  “Of course you are. Americans are always in a hurry. It is the land of the White Rabbit—‘I’m late, I’m late, for an important date!’” Pierre shook his head. “The dining room is amazing. You have to eat here. The files will take a little bit of time. Let’s wait for them in style.”

  The dining room was amazing, capped with a Byzantine dome that rivaled that of the Bode Museum’s entryway. The floor was inlaid blue mosaic tiles that shimmered like waves; as I gazed outside, directly onto the river, it felt as close to walking on water as I’d ever get.

  “Your sister gets all the credit for this,” Pierre said when we were seated at a table by the window. “The renovation happened before I arrived, but I was told it was Juliet’s vision.”