The Rich and the Dead

by Liv Spector

“To explain that, I’ll have to start at the beginning of the club itself.” He stood up again and walked to his desk, where he poured a glass of scotch from a crystal decanter into a glass.

  “The club was founded by Chase’s great-grandfather, a little after the turn of the twentieth century. Chase said the idea came to him when he and his fellow robber barons were sitting around discussing how life would be better if certain people could be gotten rid of. Of course, no one wanted to kill their enemies themselves. And hit men could never be truly trusted. They were always ready to sell out their employers to a higher bidder. The risk of being caught was too great. Then one of the robber barons came up with the idea of killing each other’s enemies. That way each of them would have an airtight alibi for the murder of the person he was connected to. At first it seemed like a joke, but the more they considered it, the more they liked the idea. It just needed rules and structure. And so, the Janus Society was born.”

  Lila began to understand. “You’re saying that the Janus Society is a murderers’ club?”

  “That’s one way to put it. Have you ever seen images of the Roman god Janus? He’s almost always shown as having two faces, just like the society’s two faces. Only one was ever shown to the world.” Dylan shook his head and stared off into the distance before continuing. “In two thousand seven, I killed Javier’s mark, a Bolivian drug kingpin who was encroaching on Javier’s gun-running business. That was my first hit. I could swallow that. The man was a sadist who left bodies in his wake.”

  Lila could tell that recounting this was taxing for Dylan. He began to look gray.

  “But Chase said that, at the next meeting, I’d have to offer a name of my own. When I protested, he assured me that my life depended on it. I can’t tell you how much I agonized over this. I contemplated running away, but I knew they’d find me. For a few months, I thought I’d kill myself, but I couldn’t follow through. I wasn’t as brave as I thought. Finally, I decided who I would have killed.

  “It would be my father.”

  “Your father?” Lila was shocked. If he’s capable of that level of cruelty, he’s capable of anything, she thought.

  “I see how you’re looking at me,” Dylan hurried to say. “But, again, I can explain.”

  “There’s no way to explain killing your own father.”

  “He was a very sick man!” Dylan protested. “No one knew other than our immediate family, but my dad was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. He could’ve lived a bit longer, but his mind was gone. And he was such a proud man that I knew he’d rather be dead than be so dependent on others. In a way, the father I knew was already long dead.”

  “So you had him murdered?”

  “I had no choice.”

  “There’s always a choice.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand. But you’re right. I did make another choice that night, when I killed those twelve people on Star Island.”

  “What made you finally do it?”

  “They asked something of me that I could not do.”

  “Worse than killing your father?”

  “So much worse. They wanted me to do the unspeakable. They wanted me to . . . ” He paused, then gave a long and angry sigh. “They wanted me to kill a child.”

  Lila was shocked. “Why a child?”

  “Precisely. It was Neville Crawley, that sick fuck. He said the little girl had seen him commit a crime, and if she told anyone, he’d be ruined. But when I investigated her, I found out that she was his own daughter, and that his ex-mistress was blackmailing him.”

  “He wanted his own child murdered?”

  Dylan nodded. “The moment I found out, I knew that there was nothing but pure sickness at the soul of the Janus Society. We had lied to ourselves that the huge charitable donations outweighed the crimes, helped balance out the damage. But I saw that was just a way we were trying to keep our consciences clean. I knew how much the bad outweighed the good. I could either kill the girl, kill myself, or kill the society. So, I decided to wipe the slate clean. One hundred years of the society was long enough. You see now that I did the right thing, don’t you? I couldn’t just cut down the tree. I had to rip the roots from the earth as well.”

  “But how did you do it? Why didn’t anyone stop you?”

  “It was simple, really. I brought night-vision goggles, so when I cut the lights, I was the only one who could see. They were all so defenseless. There was something so haunting about seeing villains like them groping around, cowering and whimpering for their lives.”

  Lila didn’t know what to say. After all this time, she had finally learned the secret of the Janus Society. The world’s most prestigious charity organization was just a cover for a bunch of killers. The truth was more horrifying than she could ever have imagined.

  “You can’t even look at me,” Dylan said, as he emptied his glass of scotch. He was so overwrought that the vein in the middle of his forehead was visible and bulging. He walked toward the desk for a refill.

  “I’m not turning away from you. I’m much stronger than you think,” Lila said, her voice small. “It’s just . . . a lot to take in. I could use a drink, too, you know.” In truth, she was terrified.

  He shot her a suspicious glance, filled up his glass, and walked back to Lila.

  “None for me?” she asked.

  “We can share,” he said, handing her the scotch. “I can’t very well carry two glasses and a gun, after all.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “About that gun.”

  “What about it?”

  “What’s the plan? You can’t keep that thing pointed at me for the rest of our lives.”

  “I know. But if I were you, I wouldn’t rush me. I’m holding all the cards.”

  Lila took a sip of scotch, then dropped her chin onto her chest and began softly weeping.

  “Don’t,” Dylan said. His voice was concerned and tender. “Please, Camilla.”

  He went to her. He gently touched her face and then lifted her chin up so that he could look in her eyes. But as his gaze met hers, his expression changed from tenderness to surprise. Lila hadn’t been crying at all.

  Right at that moment, she spit scotch in his eyes; then, with all the force that she could muster, she kicked him, jamming her heel into the side of his kneecap. He cried out in pain.

  She watched as the man she’d loved collapsed to the floor, the gun falling from his hands. Lila swooped down, picked it up, and pointed it at him.

  Suddenly, someone burst through the door. She spun around with the gun in her hand, ready to shoot.

  It was Teddy.

  “Lila!” he shouted. “It’s Dylan. Dylan is the killer!”

  “Thanks for that, Teddy.”

  “Who’s Lila?” Dylan asked, gasping in pain.

  “That’s me,” Lila said. “My name is Lila Day.”

  ONCE TEDDY AND Lila had bound Dylan’s hands and feet, they called the police.

  As they waited for the cops to arrive, Lila turned to Teddy. “How’d you figure out that Dylan was the killer?”

  “Something you said about his shooting bothered me. You said it was his fate, and you couldn’t have prevented it. But the universe doesn’t work that way, Lila.”

  “Now you tell me,” she said.

  CHAPTER 43

  DYLAN RHODES’S TRIAL captivated the globe. At first, Dylan refused to testify, and there wasn’t enough evidence without his testimony to convict him. But then Lila visited him in jail. She never told anyone what she said during that conversation, but, when she left, he had agreed to tell his story.

  She still couldn’t believe the man she loved was the killer she’d spent years pursuing. The last time she saw him, she needed to find out, above everything else, if anything real had existed between them.

  Lila had tried to convince herself that Dylan was a sociopath who’d tricked her into feeling something that wasn’t there. But despite everything he’d done, as she sat with him in his cell, she still felt
something for him. And it was clear from his desperation and sorrow that he still loved her, too.

  “Will you ever forgive me?” Dylan asked, reaching out for Lila. But she pulled away.

  “First I have to forgive myself for falling for you. But I know what will help.”

  “What?” he asked desperately.

  “I need you to tell the world the truth,” Lila whispered. “If you love me like you say you do, then I know you’ll do it.”

  And so he did.

  Through the court testimonies of Dylan, Alexei, and Lila, the true nature of the Janus Society was finally made public. It was clear to everyone who saw Dylan on the witness stand that he held nothing back. He had lost everything. All he had left was the power to tell the entire truth, to pull back the curtain on the horror show. He even testified against his brother, who was convicted of three counts of fraud, a firearms charge, and perjury.

  The revelation that the world’s most revered charitable organization was a cover for a murderers’ club shook the world to its core. It seemed as if anyone who was aided by the Janus Society unwillingly had innocent blood on their hands.

  Every day of the trial, Lila and Teddy sat together in the courtroom, listening to the prosecution’s case, though it was hard to hear. Teddy’s heart, already broken by the loss of Meredith, was now destroyed by the knowledge that the woman he loved had been a killer.

  Lila knew how he felt.

  What she and Dylan had shared made it all the more painful when she had to testify against him. She hated being on the witness stand, but finally she had the chance to tell the truth—or at least a version of the truth. There was so much that could never be revealed. That she had traveled back in time. That she was Camilla Dayton. That she was in love with the man guilty of mass murder.

  As the story of the Janus Society unfolded, it became clear that the Miami Police Department would have to reopen many of their closed cases, starting with the murder of Willow Morris. Shane Johnson was tried for and convicted of first-degree murder.

  In an attempt to reduce his sentence, Johnson testified that Effie had flown to Costa Rica to meet him, then set him up in a house in Miami, gotten him a car, which he registered in his grandmother’s name, and paid him twenty thousand dollars in cash to get rid of Willow. The reasons were now clear—Meredith wanted her gone so she could be with Teddy. So she had been Effie’s mark for the Janus Society that year. And Effie hadn’t had the heart to kill Willow herself.

  Like Dylan, Effie must have been tiring of the murder game. Lila realized that her unwillingness to take care of Willow herself was what she and Chase had been fighting about the night Lila overheard them. Effie knew that if Willow didn’t die, she herself would be killed. That was one of the ironclad rules of the society—kill or be killed. By hiring a hit man, Effie was breaking the code upon which the society was built. But it must have been the most desirable of all the terrible options available to her.

  The death of Frederic Sandoval was reclassified as a homicide. His body was exhumed, and a toxicology report found trace amounts of potassium chloride in his system, a drug that, if injected, could cause massive heart failure. Based on new evidence, Javier Martinez was posthumously convicted of murder in the first degree. Sam Logan had assigned Javier to kill Sandoval in the hope that Bolivar would drop out of the 2015 Australian Open, which he did. After finding out the truth surrounding the death of his father, Bolivar went on to win three Grand Slam championships in the 2018–2019 season. He dedicated each of them to the memory of his dad. The International Tennis Federation posthumously stripped Sam Logan, Janus Society member and four-time Wimbledon champion, of all his victories and records, essentially writing him out of the sport that he had dominated for years.

  COVERAGE OF THE Janus Society and the Star Island murders consumed the attention of the international press corps. For months it seemed as if no other news existed. There were endless front-page stories reporting on the crimes and countless editorials examining the moral, social, and cultural implications of the Janus Society revelations. Every cable and network station was clamoring to get a made-for-TV movie of the story on air before their competition beat them to it. Screenwriters were busy pitching their screenplays, and writers were pitching books to their anxious editors.

  Standing at the center of this maelstrom was Lila Day, the beautiful young detective who had cracked the case wide open. To the dismay and astonishment of every journalist on the globe, she turned down each interview request, no matter how big or lucrative, with a simple “No, thank you.” Lila had had her fill of the Star Island killer and wanted nothing more than to put the case behind her.

  While she shunned the media spotlight, Lila did enjoy one aspect of the aftermath of the Star Island case—the restoration of her reputation as a detective. And the one invitation she didn’t turn down was a celebration held by the mayor of Miami in her honor. While her former boss, her old colleagues, and the chief of police looked on, the mayor gave Lila keys to the city.

  During one of the final days of Dylan’s trial, Lila was standing outside the courthouse when her old boss, Police Chief Barker, approached her.

  “I’ve got the mayor of Miami calling me, asking why you aren’t on the force,” he said, his puffy eyes shining brightly.

  “And what did you tell him?” Lila asked. She was going to make Barker squirm, and she was going to love every second of it.

  “What can I say? Mistakes were made.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “We can make it up to you, Lila. We want you back,” he said.

  She’d been waiting for Barker to say those words for years, but now that she was hearing them, they left her cold. It was only when she was invited back to her old life that Lila realized she wasn’t interested in it anymore. She was done being a company girl.

  She graciously declined the chief’s offer with a smile.

  CHAPTER 44

  ONCE THE TRIAL was over and Dylan Rhodes was behind bars, it took several months for the rhythms of Lila’s life to return to some kind of normalcy. The world eventually moved its attention on to other things, but it took Lila longer to pick up the pieces.

  She thought a lot about Dylan. She thought a lot about Effie, too. For all their unforgivable sins, they’d both gotten stuck in a nightmare that they couldn’t escape. Effie tried to buy her way out of it by hiring a hit man. Dylan tried to murder his way to freedom by ridding the world of a monstrous club. They were villains, but they were also victims. And, in her own flawed way, Effie had been Lila’s friend.

  But now everything had changed for Lila. Catching the Star Island killer and uncovering the secret of the Janus Society had transformed her into the hero of Miami. Her once quiet, isolated life was now a riot of phone calls, street cheers, high fives, free drinks, and marriage proposals. She found it both exhausting and exhilarating.

  It seemed that everyone in her life, from old grade school teachers to her high school prom date, was getting back in touch. Everyone except the one person she wanted to hear from: Teddy Hawkins. The two of them hadn’t spoken since they parted on the courthouse steps on the final day of Dylan’s trial. The only reason she answered the phone or opened the door was the hope of once again hearing Teddy’s voice and seeing his smile.

  She and Teddy had shared so much: the pain of loving the wrong person, the joy of a secret adventure, and, ultimately, a profound friendship. She felt that she had seen two different sides of Teddy—when he was in love in the past and when he was grieving in the present—and she understood and related to all of it. After all, no one else knew what Lila had gone through.

  So when the knock on her door one steamy summer night turned out to be him, she was delighted.

  “Teddy!” she exclaimed, giving him a good once-over. “You look great.” He looked vibrant, clear-eyed, and full of life—just as he had when she met him as Camilla Dayton, that glorious afternoon on Fisher Island.

  “As do you, Lady
Day,” Teddy said. “Mind if we go for a drive? I have a proposal for you.”

  “I’d be delighted.” She followed him down to the street, where Conrad was waiting in the car. They both climbed into the backseat.

  “Conrad,” Teddy said. “Shall we?”

  The car headed east toward Indian Creek Island.

  “So,” Teddy said tentatively, testing the waters. “I see you didn’t go back to your job at the police department.”

  “That’s right,” Lila said. She was surprised at how giddy she was to be back with Teddy and Conrad. Not long ago, she’d thought they were two of the world’s most insane men. Now, in a strange way, she considered them family.

  “I guess you’re no longer interested in the crime-solving racket?”

  “It just didn’t feel right for me anymore.”

  “So, you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, then?”

  “Loads,” Lila said, smiling at Teddy.

  “Think you’d be up for another adventure?”

  Teddy’s car shot across the causeway. Lila looked out the back window at the moon’s reflection shining brightly on the tranquil waters of Biscayne Bay.

  “What do you have in mind?” she asked, smiling.

  For the first time in a long time, she knew she was headed in the right direction.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LIV SPECTOR was raised on Cape Cod and now lives in Canada. She has worked as an oyster shucker, dancer, farmhand, journalist, and teacher. A graduate of McGill University in Montreal, she received her MFA from Brooklyn College.

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  CREDITS

  Cover design by Emin Mancheril

  Cover photograph by Getty Images

  COPYRIGHT

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.