by Liv Spector
Whatever the truth was, Lila knew for sure that Effie was unraveling. She said she loved Chase, but they were obviously on the rocks. It sounded as if he was threatening to kick her out of the Janus Society, which clearly meant a great deal to her. And if the story about her father was true, then Effie was also living in fear that he might go to prison, stripping Effie of both her wealth and her reputation, transforming her overnight from princess to pariah.
It seemed like Effie would do anything to keep her world from crumbling. Maybe, Lila realized with a shock, kill for it.
Was it possible? Could Effie be the Star Island killer? In all her years of investigating the case, Lila had never truly considered that one of the victims could also be the perpetrator of the crime. The gunshot wounds and forensic evidence at the crime scene had never led her in that direction. But what if she’d had it wrong all along? What if one of the Janus Society members was the murderer?
The society operated in total secrecy. Every person that Lila had interviewed who had connections to the twelve dead stated that they had had no awareness of any of the victims’ involvement with it. And no one had known about the secret meeting at Chase’s Star Island estate except, of course, the members themselves.
So what happened? If Effie or another of the club members was the killer, then what went wrong?
The bourbon had begun to catch up with Lila, and she felt simultaneously heavy and light, exhausted and exhilarated. Her thoughts drifted away from the case and toward Dylan. Just as she was telling herself to concentrate her mind on finding the Star Island killer, her hand picked up her phone and dialed him.
From the sound of his voice, her call had pulled him out of a profoundly deep sleep. She looked at the clock. It was 3:23. She hadn’t realized it was so late.
“Camilla?” Dylan said, his voice shifting instantly from sleepy to worried. “What time is it? Is everything okay?”
“I woke you,” Lila said. Only once she heard Dylan’s sober voice did she realize just how drunk she was.
“Are you okay?” he asked, still concerned.
“I’m fine.” She paused. “I just needed to hear your voice. It’s been a very long day.”
“You sound strange.” He paused, and Lila could hear him getting out of bed. “I’m coming over.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to. I want to. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
True to his word, in fifteen minutes Dylan was at her door, in her arms, in her bed. As he removed her robe, she saw his eyes linger over the scraped flesh on her knees and hands. But he didn’t ask her what had happened, just leaned over her body, gently kissing around the edges of her cuts, while she lay back, running her hand over his back, wondering how, amid all her bad luck, she had had the fortune to meet such a man.
But he will be taken away from me, she said to herself. In less than two weeks, life as they both knew it would be over. Her love for Dylan wasn’t a blessing. If anything, it was just one more heartbreak waiting to swallow her up.
Dylan looked at her. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I was only thinking how happy I am to have met you. It’s just—” She paused, needing to swallow the truth that she couldn’t share. “I wish it had happened at a different time.”
He pressed his lips to hers.
“I was thinking the same thing today. I wish I could’ve met you years ago. My life maybe could’ve been different. Better.”
This made Lila laugh despite her sadness. “Your life is perfect. How could I make it better?”
“I told you. Things . . . aren’t always what they look like from the outside.” Dylan’s face grew grave. He continued, “There are things I’ve done that I’m not proud of. Decisions I made when I was younger. Things I would never do today.”
She took his beautiful, melancholy face in her hands. She realized he was lost, just like she was. But now they had found each other.
After they made love, Dylan fell into a deep sleep, but Lila was wide awake. She had made up her mind. She didn’t want to give in to fate anymore. Why must she always follow the rules? Where had that gotten her?
Well, she thought, not any longer.
She cared more about the man she loved than any warnings from Teddy about changing the shape of the universe. Hadn’t her very presence here in the past already changed the course of the future? She had befriended Effie, fallen in love with Dylan, held Frederic Sandoval as he took his last few breaths. She had certainly left some kind of mark. How much risk was there in making sure that Dylan wasn’t shot?
The truth was, whatever the answer, she didn’t care. Some things were worth the risk.
Before Dylan left Lila’s place late Friday morning, she made him promise that they would go for a long sail on the day he was supposed to be shot. The fates be damned. Together, they’d outrun destiny and create a new future.
CHAPTER 34
NOW THAT EFFIE had become her primary suspect, Lila decided to start with a thorough search of her house. During the daylight hours, the doors to Effie’s estate were typically unlocked. Even if she wasn’t home, at least one of the several people tasked with caring for both the property and its mistress was working busily on something.
When Lila entered the kitchen on Friday morning, one of Effie’s cooks was at the counter, feeding heaps of kale into a riotously noisy juicer.
“Is Effie in?” Lila shouted over the ruckus. The woman turned toward Lila and shook her head no while she continued to fuel the machine with vegetables.
“Miss Effie is out shopping. She’ll be back later,” the cook shouted.
“I have to borrow something from upstairs,” Lila said, pointing at the ceiling as if the noise of the juicer made gesturing a necessity. The cook shrugged and turned back to her duties.
Lila had been in Effie’s master suite plenty of times, but never alone. As she took a step inside, she quickly locked the door behind her, then flipped a switch on the wall that brought blackout curtains automatically down on the windows. She turned the lights on and began her search. If someone stumbled upon her surreptitious snooping, she knew she’d have no credible excuse. She would have to work quickly, quietly, and diligently.
Effie’s room struck Lila as what a young girl’s fantasy of an adult bedroom might look like. Large windows overlooking the ocean and the cityscape of Miami took up two sides of the bedroom. There was a small sitting area, with European furniture that had been reupholstered in animal print fabrics. The chairs and the side tables were so delicate-looking that it seemed as if a heavy gaze would crumple them. And on the west wall sat Effie’s most prized possession, a sofa created by Salvador Dalí, which, with its bright pink cushions and dual arched back, was meant to resemble Mae West’s lips. Only five had been made by the artist, and Effie had one of them.
Lila’s first stop was the closet, though it wasn’t so much a closet as an expansive, bright room that resembled an incredibly chic boutique. The all-white space was punctuated by a custom-made hot pink sofa and a pink pony-hair area rug. Her hundreds of shoes took up one entire wall, while the rest was devoted to her enviable wardrobe.
Lila began searching the various drawers, finding only piles of sunglasses, cashmere everything, and an incredibly extensive collection of lingerie. Running her hands through a bunch of silk slips, Lila jumped when she touched something metallic. A gun, Lila thought, but it was only a thin gold vibrator. She turned it on, turned it off, and placed it back in the drawer where she had found it.
She searched the bathroom, examining shelves upon shelves of creams, unguents, and ointments from all over the world that promised to keep time at bay, but found nothing. Then she moved to the two antique mirrored bedside tables that flanked the bed, opening each drawer and giving every object a thorough once-over. There was nothing besides a silk sleep mask, a bottle of Ambien, and a cream that, according to the label, was for the “décolletage.” Still nothin
g.
But years of experience as a detective had given Lila a pretty sharp instinct. She moved the side table to see if there was anything between it and the wall, and bingo: there in the floor was a barely perceptible change in the wood grain. She felt around the edges of the area and, after some experimenting, found that when she pressed on one of the corners, a secret door popped open.
The hidden compartment contained a Wilson Combat customized .45 handgun with a titanium suppressor, built to muffle the sound of a gunshot, along with several boxes of ammo. “Bingo,” Lila whispered. This wasn’t a weapon that someone like Effie might have for self-defense. Lila had seen a gun of this make only once, when she found it in the dead hand of one of the Mexican cartels’ most notorious assassins.
“What in the world are you up to, Effie Webster?” Lila whispered.
Time was ticking. Every minute she was in this room by herself, Lila risked being discovered. She returned the gun to its home and moved the table back to its proper place. At that moment, she spotted Effie’s laptop sitting atop a bunch of art books on an antique bookshelf. In less than a few minutes, Lila had copied the entirety of Effie’s computer onto the external hard drive she’d used to do the same thing to Javier.
A moment later, the blinds were up, the door was unlocked, and Lila was bounding down the stairs with one of Effie’s L’Wren Scott cocktail dresses held high in her right hand as her cover, just in case Effie asked why she’d been in her bedroom without her.
Now Lila knew that, this whole time, she’d been living in a hornet’s nest. She needed to be more careful than ever. As Lila was walking back to the guesthouse, she couldn’t help feel, amid the shock, that she had been completely betrayed by a woman she had come to think of as a friend.
LATER THAT EVENING, Lila sat on the couch with her feet up and a glass of white wine within arm’s reach, sifting carefully through the contents of Effie’s hard drive. Everything appeared fairly normal until she encountered a number of files that were under the same type of military-grade data encryption that she had found on Javier Martinez’s computer. She wondered if all of the members of the Janus Society had their data protected to this extent.
Just as she had done before, Lila sent the files to Shadow, the hacker. Within two hours, he had cracked the data protection.
There was a long correspondence between Effie and someone who called himself “the Facilitator.” The Facilitator had sent Effie daily in-depth reports on the comings and goings of a person identified only as “the Target.” The information reminded Lila of the surveillance she’d found of Sandoval on Javier’s computer.
Then Lila’s heart jumped; she saw who the Facilitator was sending his surveillance reports to: [email protected]. She looked at the e-mails again. Effie had been carrying on the correspondence with an unidentified spy under the name Camilla Dayton.
Lila then looked deeper into the files and was shocked to discover that numerous flight itineraries had been booked under the name Camilla Dayton. The first flight was taken on October 10 to Costa Rica, just a few days after Effie had invited Lila to stay with her at the guesthouse. Not only had Effie lied about the destination of every trip she’d taken since Lila moved in, but it appeared as if she’d been carrying out an elaborate scheme to set Lila up. But why? Was Effie planning on framing Lila for the Star Island murders?
Lila knew what she had to do next. She had to shadow Effie in order to uncover the identities of the Facilitator and the Target.
Lila unearthed the black wig she’d used to impersonate her old self on Thanksgiving night at the police station. She rented a nondescript car that she parked at a construction site a few doors down. And then Lila trailed Effie around the streets of Miami.
After four exhausting days of tailing Effie as she went from the Delano to the Soho Beach House to Club Deuce to the shops of Bal Harbour and every Ocean Drive hot spot in between, Lila was losing patience. She now had only a little more than a week before the Star Island killer would strike, and she didn’t want to waste it watching Effie pick out shoes.
Finally, on the fifth day, Christmas Eve, she caught a break. Lila was watching as Effie tried on sunglasses at Barneys when Effie got a text that sent her hustling out of the department store and into her car. Lila followed, two cars behind. Effie drove south on Collins, across the MacArthur Causeway, then north on Bayshore. Lila watched as she pulled her car over at a small park, got out, and removed a shopping bag from her trunk. Lila drove past and pulled her car over a few hundred feet ahead, keeping her eye on Effie through the rearview mirror.
Apart from Effie and four retirees practicing tai chi, the park was empty, making it hard for Lila to stay close without being detected. Effie was visibly nervous, and seemed acutely aware of every inch of her surroundings. She was constantly swiveling her head, like a mouse searching for a hawk.
As Effie walked toward the water, a man stepped out from behind a tree and approached her. Lila quickly sat on a bench about thirty feet from where, she assumed, “Camilla” was meeting with the Facilitator.
Wearing a motorcycle jacket and jeans, the man was wiry and bald, and he walked with the rigid posture that comes only from years of military training. From where Lila sat, it looked like he had scarred skin and tattooed eyebrows. Effie handed the shopping bag over to the Facilitator, and then the meeting was over.
Effie spun around and, with her head down, walked back toward her car, right past Lila, who shielded her face with her hand as if to block out the sun. The moment Effie passed, Lila jumped up and set off to follow the bald man.
Holding the bag, he walked along the water toward the Grand, a monolith of a hotel that rose high up into the sky. Lila followed. But she must have been getting too close because, in an instant, the man began running. Making a split-second choice between maintaining her cover and pursuing her suspect, Lila took off after him.
The man, clutching the bag under his arm like a running back cradling a football, made a sharp right up the Grand’s staircase and entered the hotel lobby with Lila in hot pursuit. But when she entered the cavernous lobby, all traces of him had disappeared. Weaving among the meandering tourists, Lila searched to no avail. Her heart was racing, and drops of sweat were streaming down her face from the itchy heat of the wig atop her head.
Lila stood by the revolving doors that led out to the main street, trying to catch her breath and hoping to pick up the scent of the Facilitator. Five minutes later, she knew the trace had gone cold. She exited the building, planning to sweep its perimeter, when she suddenly spotted him across the street, walking toward a red Pontiac. When he saw that he’d been found, his lips curled into a murderous scowl. He jumped in the car and tore out onto the road. There was no chance of catching him. But through the smoke of burned rubber left from his tires, Lila had been able to identify the license plate. Relief washed over her.
That was all the information she needed to hunt him down.
IT WAS ONE in the morning on Christmas Day when Lila, still wearing her wig, walked back into the Miami police station. Just as he had been on Thanksgiving night, Kreps was dozing off behind the front desk, his chin on his uniformed chest. Lila tried to pass by into the back office undetected, but Kreps snorted awake. In thirty years on the force, not much had gotten past him.
“Back so soon?” he asked. “Thought you went home for the night.”
“I forgot something at my desk,” Lila replied. “Just gotta go and grab it.”
“Sure, and while you’re getting that, why don’t you also get yourself a life?”
“Good one, Kreps,” Lila said, smiling despite herself. With a little bit of distance, even Kreps’s corny jokes and grumpy demeanor made her nostalgic for her old life.
Lila walked through the desolate halls to her empty desk, flicked on the lights, and sat down. She logged in to her computer and opened up the Department of Motor Vehicles database.
Lila discovered that the Facilitator was driving a car registered
to Esther Johnson, age eighty-six, of Ambrose, Georgia. This didn’t surprise Lila. No criminal worth his weight would drive a car that was registered under his own name. More typically, either the license plates were stolen or the vehicle was registered to a relative. Seeing that neither the vehicle nor the plates were listed as missing, Lila hoped that she could make a connection between Esther Johnson and the man with the tattooed eyebrows.
After a few hours searching IRS records, Lila was able to compile a list of dependents the old woman in Georgia had claimed, long ago, on her tax returns. From there, Lila could find the children of those dependents. Then she cross-checked the names of Esther’s sons and grandsons—there were eight of them between ages fifteen and sixty-three—with the Veterans’ Service Records, because she would bet her life that this guy was ex-military. That was when she hit the jackpot. She found him. His military photo showed a much younger man, with hair and eyebrows intact, skin unscarred, but it was definitely him.
He was Shane Johnson, age forty-seven, and from what Lila could dig up, he’d had his thumb in almost every nasty black ops plot that the government perpetrated, from running guns to the Contras when he was in his teens to supervising soldiers at Abu Ghraib. He was granted an honorable discharge in 2008 after sustaining second-degree burns on his face and torso from a roadside IED while in Baghdad. Most likely, that was what had left him bald and without eyebrows.
After he left the military, the trail went fairly dark. In 2010, he was picked up for assault in New Orleans, but the charges were later dropped. According to his tax returns, from 2010 until 2013, Johnson was an employee of Xe Services, the army of mercenaries known to supplement U.S. military operations.
The only possible reason Effie would have to get mixed up with a man as shady as Shane Johnson was if she needed a murderer for hire. Had the transaction at the park today been Effie giving Shane money to carry out the Star Island murders? But, if that was the case, how did Effie end up dead? Maybe the deal Effie had made with this killer would somehow go sour. Or was someone else paying him, too?