The Rich and the Dead

by Liv Spector

  Thoughts of her late mother’s hospital bills, her overdue car payments, her rent, and her frozen credit cards descended on Lila like the oppressive weather, making it almost impossible to breathe. She was broke, she was in debt, and now she was unemployed.

  She was crossing the parking lot toward her car, her mind listing one worry after another, when a rapid clicking noise interrupted her thoughts. She looked up and saw an old man on the other side of the street, sitting in a midnight-blue Bentley and pointing a long-lensed camera in her direction. She swiveled around to see what he was photographing, but there was nothing behind her except the empty parking lot. Was he taking pictures of her?

  Just as she turned back to the man, the car pulled away and disappeared around the corner. Lila stood glued to the same spot, staring blankly at where the car had been. Its exhaust fumes still hung suspended in the morning air. There was something about that old man, about this specific moment in time, that seemed intensely familiar to Lila, almost as if this had happened before.

  She shook herself out of her momentary daze and climbed into her already sunbaked car, which felt something like climbing into a furnace. Déjà vu, she thought with a shrug.

  The sun had only been up for an hour, and Lila’s day, as far as she was concerned, was already done.

  CHAPTER 2

  LILA LIVED IN a run-down two-story stucco apartment building overlooking a small patch of grass and palm trees called Ernesto Lecuona Park, in the heart of Little Havana. With its thin, dirty walls, cheap tiled floors, and cracked ceilings, her apartment had an undeniable charmlessness. No one would choose to live in a place like this. It was where unlucky people fell when they stopped reaching for the life they wanted.

  Sweating from the heat of the day and profoundly exhausted, Lila undressed clumsily, leaving her clothes in a careless pile by the foot of the bed. The sharp smells of blood and vomit still clung to her hair. She wrapped herself in a robe and started a bath. Her robe was a thing of beauty, made of deep emerald silk delicately embroidered with white and purple lilies. It had been a gift from her mom, their last Christmas together. The card attached had read, “Something soft for my tough little cookie. Love, Mom.”

  Lila threw back two chalky aspirin and chased them down with a gulp of bourbon on the rocks. After everything that had just happened, she needed to clear her head.

  A cop is only as good as her instincts. And for most of her short but remarkable eight years on the Miami police force, Lila Day’s instincts had been dead-on. She was famous among the force for her preternatural ability to know who was guilty, who was innocent, and how to tease out the truth. When cops and prosecutors asked her how she was able to solve tough cases before anyone else, she’d just shrug. In her mind, there was nothing to it. Her only confusion was why it took everybody else so long to figure things out.

  When she was fresh out of the academy, Lila’s first assignment had been patrolling Little Haiti, one of the toughest neighborhoods in Miami. All of her superiors and fellow rookies thought she’d quit within weeks. None of them understood why a twenty-one-year-old woman would choose to spend her life chasing after bad guys.

  “A sweet thing like you,” her sergeant had said to Lila her first day on patrol. “Those thugs’ll be smacking their lips to get a taste.”

  Lila had been forced to put up with a lot of that kind of bullshit. That was one part of the job she didn’t miss at all—the sneering, sleazy stuff the guys liked to pull. She always saw it as a test, and one she passed by simply ignoring them. She never thought much about her appearance, and hated when she saw women using their looks for some kind of advantage. That could only ever be a losing game. Men always told Lila that she was pretty. They also talked a lot of other shit, and she didn’t pay that any mind either. What did it matter when there was a job to be done?

  After just two years on the force, Lila made detective. Four years after that, she was assigned as lead investigator on the most high-profile case in the history of Miami: the Star Island massacre. There was an immediate outcry among the other detectives—she was too young, too inexperienced for a case that big. She was bound to fail.

  And they were right.

  Lila’s hunt for the Star Island killer robbed her of her center of gravity. Suddenly the relentlessness that normally made her so good at her job was working against her. She couldn’t solve the case, but neither could she move on and let it go.

  When perfectionists fail, sometimes they shatter.

  If instincts are what make a good cop, then self-doubt is what gets cops killed. And the endless hunt for the Star Island killer left Lila drowning in self-doubt. She had lost her trust in herself.

  She sighed, dropped her robe, and stepped into the tub. She hadn’t meant to think about the Star Island murders today. The case was her greatest failure as a cop, and now she’d failed herself again, as a lowly hotel security guard.

  Just then, there was a violent knock at her front door. Lila froze, up to her ankles in bathwater. She looked at the clock. It was a little after eight in the morning. Who it was didn’t matter. That was a knock Lila had no interest in answering. Ignoring it, she was just about to lie down in the bath, but the knocking grew louder and faster.

  “What the hell?” Lila muttered. She got out of the tub and put her robe back on, hurrying toward the door to give that noisy bastard a piece of her mind. She glanced out her apartment window and was startled to see that the person knocking was none other than the old man she’d noticed earlier, the one who’d been taking pictures of her. He was wearing a black suit, a chauffeur’s cap, and driving gloves. Lila looked to the street, and there was the midnight-blue Bentley, parked behind her car.

  “Ms. Day? Ms. Day, please open the door,” the old man said in a highly refined English accent. “Ms. Day, I come with an urgent request.”

  Lila was immune to most temptations, but she never could resist the almost gravitational pull of her curiosity. So now that a strange man with mysterious business had come literally knocking on her door, there was no way in hell she wasn’t going to answer.

  CHAPTER 3

  MS. DAY, MY sincerest apologies. I know it is quite early,” the old man said as Lila opened the door.

  Despite the oppressive summer heat, he was dressed in a three-piece black wool suit. He carried himself in a stiff and disciplined manner. She watched as his eyes took note of her bare feet and the silk robe that covered her body yet concealed little of her shape. His face reddened slightly.

  “I beg your forgiveness, but the inappropriateness of this meeting only reflects the urgent nature of my request. My name is Conrad Whittington. I’m in the employ of Mr. Theodore Hawkins. Do you remember Mr. Hawkins?”

  “Of course,” she answered, startled to hear the name.

  “He would like to speak with you, immediately.”

  Conrad handed Lila his videophone. Lila recognized the face of the caller on-screen as that of tech billionaire Teddy Hawkins. She hadn’t seen Teddy since she interviewed him several years ago, in connection with the Star Island case. Now he looked older than his thirty-five years, more tired and washed out.

  “Detective Day,” Teddy began. “We’ve met before.”

  “I remember,” Lila said, curious.

  To live in Miami was to know Teddy Hawkins, an MIT dropout turned tech billionaire who was once a fixture of the South Beach social scene. He had been famous, or, depending on who was telling the story, infamous, for the parties he used to throw at his Star Island estate. Everyone who was anyone in Miami had gathered around Teddy like moths to a flame. Until the Star Island massacre changed everything. The day after the murders, Teddy boarded up his Star Island mansion and never again set foot on the estate.

  Lila had met Teddy once, when she interviewed him in March 2015, a few months after the murders. He hadn’t been very willing to participate in the police investigation, but after Lila threatened to bring him down to the station, he agreed to cooperate. Teddy had ne
ver been a suspect in the murders—he was out of the country at the time—but he knew almost all of the victims socially, so Lila had hoped that he could be of some use. He wasn’t.

  And now here he was, on the phone, wanting to talk to her.

  “I have a proposal for you,” Teddy went on. “A job offer, if you will.”

  “A job offer?” she repeated dumbly. Conrad stood perfectly still on Lila’s stoop.

  “It’s something we must discuss in person. I never talk business over the phone.”

  “Why didn’t you just come yourself?” Lila asked, instantly on guard.

  “Please, Detective Day, I’d prefer to have this conversation at my home, where we’re guaranteed privacy. Conrad will drive you.”

  “And how do I know that I’ll be safe?” Lila demanded. “After all, you had him follow me this morning. I saw him taking pictures of me outside the hotel.”

  “Those are standard precautions. You’re in no danger. You have my word.”

  “Your word? Does that count for something?”

  “I’d like to think it does.” Teddy paused. Lila could see that he was searching for what to say. “From what I understand, as of this morning, you’re out of a job. Is that correct?”

  “How would you know that?” Lila snapped.

  “I apologize. That’s none of my business. I only ask for a few minutes of your time. Believe me when I say that this is something I know you’ll find interesting.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I need to change. Give me a minute.”

  Before Teddy could respond, she hung up and handed the phone back to Conrad.

  “I’ll be waiting for you in the car, miss,” he said calmly, with a small, deferential bow.

  Lila went back inside her apartment, grabbed the glass of now-watery bourbon that was sitting on the lip of the bathtub, and threw its contents down her throat. She let out a loud exhale. Seeing Teddy again had set her on edge. In her mind, he was inextricably linked to the Star Island killings. And that case was something she had wanted to forget.

  She glanced in the mirror. She looked as exhausted as she felt. Since she’d turned thirty, Lila had noticed that her face was thinner and more angular, no longer round with the softness of girlhood. Dark shadows of fatigue had taken up permanent residence under her large hazel eyes.

  She tied her long black hair up in a messy bun and splashed some cold water on her face, then threw on a white T-shirt and jeans. Christ, she missed her police uniform. But if she didn’t have the protection of the uniform, the second best thing she could give herself was a gun. Lila quickly strapped on her ankle holster and selected her 9 mm Beretta, her favorite small gun for getting out of a pinch.

  A few minutes later, Lila Day was in the backseat of the midnight-blue Bentley as it sped down the cramped and disintegrating streets of Little Havana. She blinked when opaque black scrims lowered over all the windows. She couldn’t see anything.

  “Conrad? What’s going on?”

  “Mr. Hawkins has requested that the location of his residence remain concealed.”

  Of course he had, Lila thought, rolling her eyes. As someone who’d had her fair share of real-life crime, she found it exasperating when people went looking for intrigue.

  “I can still see out the front window,” Lila pointed out to the back of the chauffeur’s head.

  “True, miss,” Conrad said. Then he raised the solid divider between them.

  With the privacy partition all the way up, Lila felt like she was riding in a black box. She didn’t even know what direction they were going. She reached in her pocket for her cell phone, pulling up its GPS tracking to see the Maps app, but she couldn’t get even a faint signal.

  “Damn it,” she said, throwing the phone down on the seat. Teddy must have installed a cell phone jammer in his car.

  She leaned back on the dark leather seat and closed her eyes, preparing herself for the worst.

  CHAPTER 4

  BY THE TIME Lila felt the car come to a definitive stop, she’d had at least an hour to work up a cold, almost breathless fury.

  Conrad opened her door from the outside, and Lila stepped out to find herself in a vast and echoing garage that housed at least a dozen high-end cars. She couldn’t help gasping; she’d always had a weakness for luxury cars.

  “Lila,” Teddy said as he walked across the room to greet her. His voice was low, and Lila found it infuriatingly calm. “Thank you for indulging my desire to meet face-to-face.”

  “You didn’t give me much of a choice,” Lila said sharply, all her anger returning to the surface.

  While Teddy had once been known for his boyish handsomeness, his face was now a collection of furrows and dark shadows. He was still a good-looking man, that was undeniable—his features were as strong as Lila remembered—but there was a strained look about them now, a tightness to his square jaw and full lips that Lila hadn’t seen before. He was pale, and his light brown hair had grown into an unkempt shag that was graying slightly around the temples. His round, heavily lashed brown eyes, once bright and playful, locked carefully on her.

  For a moment, they regarded each other in an uncomfortable silence. “Why don’t we go inside?” Teddy finally asked, walking across the enormous garage toward a large wooden door. Lila followed him, with Conrad trailing behind her. The weight of the gun strapped to her ankle was solid, reassuring.

  “Quite a nice collection of cars you have here,” Lila said as they passed a 1961 Ferrari GT and then a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss. She ran her finger along it as she walked by.

  “Oh, yes. Strange, I hardly drive any of them anymore,” Teddy said distractedly as he climbed the stairs to the main house.

  Money is always wasted on the rich, Lila thought.

  The instant Teddy pushed the door open, Lila had to close her eyes against the blast of sunlight. She followed him into an enormous living room with a twenty-foot ceiling, wooden beams, and an entire glass wall overlooking a breathtaking view of the ocean.

  “Please, sit with me,” Teddy said, gesturing to two chairs covered in a supple leather the color of fresh cream.

  Lila perched cautiously on a chair and looked outside. A perfectly green lawn was sliced in half by an infinity pool that stretched out toward the turquoise ocean.

  “I was sad to hear that you lost your job,” Teddy said.

  Lila shrugged. “Well, that makes one of us. I wasn’t too upset about it. Working hotel security isn’t my calling, I guess.”

  “No, not that job. I mean, I was sorry that you left the police department. You were a good cop.”

  “Not good enough, clearly. But that’s in the past now.” Lila’s tone was clipped. She hoped he hadn’t brought her here to talk about the Star Island case, because she sure as hell didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Do you ever think about him?” Teddy asked, turning toward Lila.

  “Who?”

  “The Star Island killer, of course.”

  Lila stood up from her chair so fast she almost knocked it over. She didn’t know what game he was playing, but she didn’t need the mistakes of her past thrown in her face. “I should get going,” she said, heading toward the door only to realize that she had no idea where she was and no way to get home.

  “Not yet,” Teddy said. “You haven’t given me a chance to tell you why I’ve brought you here.”

  “Whatever it is, I’m not interested. And whatever you’re searching for, you’re not going to find it by keeping tabs on me. So call Conrad off, okay?”

  “I watched you because I had to make sure you were the right person for the job,” Teddy said, rising from his seat and walking slowly toward Lila. “Turns out you are.”

  “The right person for what job?”

  “Catching the Star Island killer.”

  CHAPTER 5

  IMPOSSIBLE.” LILA’S VOICE was dangerously flat. “Trust me. I spent years of my life searching for the killer. And I got nowhere.” The words stuck i
n her throat. Her failure to solve the case was a wound that wouldn’t heal. And here was Teddy, picking at the scabs.

  “Please, Detective,” he implored. “Hear me out. If you aren’t interested in my offer, I’ll understand. Conrad will drive you home. You’ll never hear from me again. Just five minutes, I promise.”

  Her curiosity getting the better of her as usual, Lila sat back down. But this time she curled her legs up in the chair, giving her quicker access to her gun, just in case.

  “First,” Teddy said, turning to face her, “how much do you know about the Janus Society?”

  ON THAT FATEFUL New Year’s Day when the Star Island killer struck, the world lost more than the twelve wealthy and influential individuals who were found dead in Chase Haverford’s wine cellar. Though it was unknown at the time, the world had also been robbed of its greatest philanthropic organization—the Janus Society.

  Founded in the infancy of the twentieth century, the Janus Society was an international charitable organization whose works were so admired that it had come to be known as the world’s fairy godmother. Thanks to its donations, famines had been stopped, polio nearly eradicated, the ancient libraries of Timbuktu preserved, the Bolshoi Ballet saved from bankruptcy, oil spills contained, children educated, faltering economies salvaged, dying languages preserved, and on and on.

  Every year on January 1, the society announced the recipient of its annual $100 million donation. Charities and environmental organizations worldwide often spent their New Year’s Eve praying, hoping, that this would be their year. It was not unusual to hear of people waiting on their knees by the phone, begging for a call from the Janus Society. It had been named for a Roman god, the god of beginnings, and it provided countless opportunities for millions in need across the globe.

  But the Janus Society had one extremely controversial feature: complete and utter secrecy. Not once in the hundred years the charity had been in operation was the identity of a single member exposed. Thus, people said, its donations were truly unbiased. No one could lobby the society to be picked, because no one had any idea who was even in the society, or where it was headquartered, or how many members it had.