The Key

by Jennifer Sturman

  “Which brings us back to Jake and Annabel,” I said. “Which also brings us back to the fact that Jake tried to shoot me at the boat basin.”

  “Rach, you’re practically blind,” Hilary said. “Are you absolutely sure Jake was shooting at you?”

  “And if you’re practically blind, why did you assure me that you were fine to drive my car?” added Luisa pointedly.

  “It was Jake at the boat basin. I’m sure of that. And it was Mark—I mean, Andrew—who rescued me from him. There’s only one possible explanation. Jake and Annabel may not have killed Gallagher, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t jump at the opportunity to make the most out of his death.” I explained my theory about the likely terms of Annabel’s prenuptial agreement. “The Thunderbolt deal had to go forward, at least if the two of them wanted to make sure they would have sufficient ill-gotten gains on which to live happily ever after. They wouldn’t want to have to work for the rest of their lives, would they?”

  “Did you tell the police about this?” asked Jane.

  I shook my head. “I tried, but as far as they were concerned, they had a confessed killer and his brother on the hook. They weren’t terribly interested in my theories.”

  The phone rang just then—not my BlackBerry, which I’d long since given up any hope of recovering from the tourist’s backpack—but my home phone.

  “Should I get that?” asked Peter. He consulted the caller ID on the handset. “It says Private Caller.”

  “Why don’t we let the machine get it? Everyone I’d want to talk to is already here.”

  “How sweet,” said Hilary dryly.

  We could hear the answering machine from the study, and my voice inviting callers to leave a message. Then we could hear the caller leaving his message.

  “Rachel, Jake here.”

  His tone was friendly. Like it never would have occurred to him to frame me for murder, much less try to kill me.

  “Speak of the devil,” said Jane.

  “It’s been a crazy couple of days, hasn’t it? I still can’t get over the news about Mark Anders. I heard that it was you who managed to get the gun away from him at the shareholders’ meeting—nice work! I didn’t even recognize you, and then I guess I missed you after. It was quite a scene. Give me a call when you get a chance. I want to make sure you’re okay.”

  “The nerve of that guy!” said Peter. This was rapidly becoming his standard response to all matters involving Jake.

  “He doesn’t know that we know what we know,” I told him. “But he probably wants to find out if we do know what we know, so that he can know if he needs to worry about what we know.”

  “When you put it like that, I don’t know if we know what we know,” said Luisa. She had opened both the window and the screen and was now perched on the sill, the hand with her cigarette held carefully outside.

  “Luisa, you’re making me very nervous,” Jane said. “We’re fifteen flights up.”

  “Actually, only fourteen. There’s no thirteenth floor,” I said.

  Luisa just shrugged and exhaled a stream of smoke into the air above 79th Street.

  “How do children in New York learn to count, anyhow?” asked Jane.

  “While we’re on the subject of what we know, or don’t know, or wherever we were, what about the mysterious stranger in the suede jacket?” asked Emma.

  “That’s right,” said Hilary. “What about Mr. Mysterious? Who is he?”

  “And why does he keep showing up everywhere and then disappearing again?” asked Jane.

  The intercom chose that moment to buzz.

  “That had better not be Jake,” said Peter.

  I got up and went to answer it.

  “Miss Rachel?” said the doorman. I’d long since given up on trying to convince him to drop the “miss.”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a man here to see you? He said you’d recognize him from his black eye?”

  “Speak of the other devil,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Send him up, please.”

  chapter thirty-three

  T here were only four apartments on my floor, but their front doors opened onto a space so small that it felt full when just one of my neighbors and I chanced to be in it at the same time. This didn’t stop all six of us from rushing out to meet the mysterious stranger. We watched with great anticipation as the old-fashioned dial above the elevator began to trace its slow path from the lobby up to fifteen.

  The elevator dial stopped for a long moment at three. “One would think that a person could walk up two flights of stairs,” said Luisa.

  “That was probably Mr. and Mrs. Ditweiler. He has a touch of rheumatism in his knee, and she just had her hip replaced a few months ago,” I explained. “She makes gingerbread men for the building Christmas party every year. They’re really good.”

  The dial resumed its path, creeping along to five, six and seven. Then it stopped again at eight.

  “The mysterious stranger is big on building suspense, isn’t he?” said Hilary.

  “It’s part of the whole mysterious thing,” Emma told her.

  “How much of their lives do you think New Yorkers waste waiting for elevators?” asked Peter.

  “Less than Californians waste sitting in cars,” I said.

  The dial started moving again, this time advancing steadily onward from eight to twelve and then directly to fourteen.

  “The poor kids,” said Jane. “They have no reason to think that thirteen even exists.”

  The doors finally slid open, and the mysterious stranger stepped out, black eye and all.

  “Hi!” cried Hilary. “I’m Hilary. Who are you?”

  He looked from one face to another. I guessed he wasn’t expecting to find such a crowd waiting for him. I cleared my throat and gave a little wave, and his gaze landed on me.

  “Ms. Benjamin?”

  “Why don’t we skip right to first names?” I suggested. After all, we’d been spending a lot of quality time together of late.

  “I’m Special Agent Lattimer. Ben Lattimer.”

  It was nice finally to have a real name for the guy—“Mysterious Dark-Haired Stranger in the Suede Jacket” had been more than a little cumbersome. But Ben didn’t look anything like a special agent. He wasn’t wearing a dark suit, white shirt, narrow tie, and sunglasses. Instead, he had on a pair of faded Levi’s, a striped button-down, and, of course, his suede jacket.

  “When you say Special Agent, what exactly are you a special agent of? Could we see some identification?” Peter asked, placing his hand on my shoulder. Only if you knew him as well as I did would you have picked up on the note of tension in his voice. He’d been both embarrassed and annoyed that a complete stranger had been in on the Andrew Marcus tackle with me. He’d also been less than appreciative when I pointed out that his Iron City consumption the previous evening might have slowed his reflexes.

  Ben reached into his jacket and withdrew one of those leather badge holders you see on TV. He flipped it open. “FBI Financial Fraud Unit.”

  “Cool,” said Hilary.

  We all took turns studying Ben’s ID before agreeing that it looked authentic and ushering him into the apartment. None of us was sure if it was appropriate to offer food to special agents, but it seemed rude to continue eating without making the offer, and he accepted with an enthusiasm that suggested he hadn’t been recently feasting on pierogies, coffee cake, or Quarter Pounders with Cheese.

  “I first got interested when Perry did the Tiger buyout,” he told us between mouthfuls of curry. “Bill Marcus wrote us—the Unit, I mean—a bunch of letters outlining his theory.”

  “You pay attention to that sort of thing?” I asked in surprise. I didn’t want to think about how much trouble I could have saved myself, not to mention everyone else in the room, if I’d simply reported my concerns to somebody like Ben in the first place.

  “We get a lot of letters from crackpots,” Ben acknowledge
d. “But you never know when one of those crackpots is going to be blowing the whistle on the next Enron.”

  “There seem to be a lot of crackpots in Texas,” said Hilary. Ben looked at her blankly. “You know. Enron. Texas. Crackpots.”

  “Anyhow,” continued Ben,“the Marcus letters were actually pretty coherent, at least compared to some of what we see. And the basic chronology and the people involved were exactly as Marcus outlined. Which made me think that maybe he wasn’t your garden-variety crackpot. I started looking for a money trail, and it turned out that all three of the principals—Perry, Gallagher, and Brisbane—had some interesting offshore accounts.”

  “Were the accounts in their own names?” said Luisa. “Because I couldn’t find a thing.”

  “Far from it. I’d heard that Gallagher was an expert at making money, but he was also an expert at hiding it. They were buried deep, hidden inside a maze of shell companies and private partnerships. It was a real mess, but once I located the accounts, I could begin tracing the flows of cash in and out.”

  “And then?” prompted Emma. “What happened then?”

  Ben ran a hand through his dark hair. “And then a new case came in, a live one, and I had to put the Tiger investigation on hold. After all, it was only a speculative thing, a routine follow-up on a letter from the crackpot file.”

  “But you kept with it anyway, right?” asked Jane, a firm believer in perseverance as a virtue.

  “I’d hoped to keep with it in my spare time, but the new case didn’t leave me with any. When it eventually wrapped, I wanted to go back to investigating the Tiger deal, but I was told that another agent had taken up where I left off and concluded there wasn’t anything to it.”

  “Seriously?” I said. “Wow, those guys were good. I mean, if trained professionals couldn’t find evidence of anything wrong—”

  “Not so fast,” said Ben. “That’s not the whole story. I didn’t think much about it at the time, and before long I was neck-deep in another new case, and then another, and after a while I’d pretty much forgotten about the Tiger deal. Until last week, that is. Which is when I read an article about the Thunderbolt buyout—”

  “—which got you wondering,” interrupted Hilary.

  “Exactly. So I went to pull the Tiger file. Only—”

  “—there was no Tiger file!”

  “Hilary,” Luisa said. “Let the man finish his own sentences.”

  “She’s right, though, isn’t she? The Tiger file was gone?” I asked.

  “It was more than gone. There was no trace that it or even the letters from Bill Marcus had ever existed. Everything had been completely wiped from the system.”

  “That sounds like the sort of thing that happens in South American dictatorships, where the government ‘disappears’ people,” said Hilary.

  “Thank you for perpetuating tired stereotypes of my homeland,” said Luisa.

  “Look,” said Ben,“I don’t know who erased the records, or where the order to do so came from, but remember a United States senator was involved. My initial investigation probably tripped an alarm or two somewhere important.”

  “Whatever happened to checks and balances?” asked Jane.

  Ben shrugged. “The very fact that the records were gone confirmed for me that I’d been on to something. And the good news is, based on what we saw at today’s shareholders’ meeting, a lot of people suspected what Perry had going with Gallagher and Brisbane. With all of the shareholders present and the media coverage, there’s no way there won’t be a thorough investigation now. Perry and Brisbane may have dodged some very real bullets, but I think their respective careers may be over.”

  “But what about Jake Channing’s career? You must have suspected him, too,” Peter asked. “Or why else were you following him?”

  “That’s why I’m here,” he said.

  “Oh.” I said knowingly. Then I realized I had no idea what he meant. “What do you mean ‘that’s why you’re here’?”

  “When I read about the Thunderbolt deal, and after finding the Tiger file gone, I decided it was worth looking into things on my own. I called Winslow, Brown on Monday morning pretending to be from Perry’s office to get the names of the bankers working on the deal with Gallagher. I thought his team would either be in on the entire thing or would make good witnesses. Once I had your names, I did some digging. It didn’t take long to find out that not only had Jake worked at Gallagher’s old firm, he used to date Gallagher’s wife, so I was suspicious of him from the beginning, and even more so once Gallagher was murdered.”

  “If you were investigating us, didn’t you find out about Mark Anders actually being Andrew Marcus?” I asked. “Didn’t that raise any flags or trip any alarms or anything?”

  He shook his head. “No. It was sloppy of me, especially in retrospect, but I figured that looking into the junior associate would be a waste of time; he was unlikely to know much of anything. Instead I focused on Jake and on you, Rachel. I had my concerns about Jake, but you checked out clean. I wanted to approach you, but I wasn’t sure how. I needed to get a better sense of whether I could trust you.”

  “And that’s why you were eavesdropping when we were at the St. Regis on Tuesday night?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah. Sorry about that, but I didn’t want to just march right up and introduce myself. Then Dahlia was attacked on Wednesday morning, and you disappeared, so I was left with Jake. I was trying to figure out my next move when I saw him meet up with Annabel Gallagher late on Wednesday.”

  “And you were following him on Thursday, when I saw you at Starbucks,” I said.

  “That’s right. It didn’t take long to put two and two together. I figured that they were behind both Gallagher’s murder and the attack on Dahlia Crenshaw. In fact, I almost stopped you that afternoon, to try to warn you, but I was worried that you’d alert Jake, since you and he seemed to be friends, and I didn’t want to lose track of him. That was an excellent disguise, by the way. I would never have recognized you if I hadn’t been able to hear you and Jake talking.”

  “So you were following Jake. And you followed him to the boat basin on Thursday night.”

  “Not that I did much good there. I wasn’t far behind him when I saw somebody else following him. Now I know it was Andrew Marcus, but at the time I thought it might have been another accomplice, so I had to give Jake more of a lead than I would have liked. And I didn’t realize he was counting on meeting you there. Then I heard shots, and I came running—”

  “—and collided into me,” I concluded for him. “Sorry about that.”

  He gave me a sheepish smile. “Occupational hazard.”

  “Okay. So you were on to Jake and Annabel. But what do you want from us?” asked Peter.

  “I’m on to Jake and Annabel—it sounds like we’re all on to Jake and Annabel—but we don’t have any proof.”

  “Jake seems to think he can bluff his way though,” I told Ben, explaining about the e-mail Jake had sent me and his message from earlier that night. “And he thinks I’m clueless enough to buy his bluff.”

  “The nerve of that guy,” Peter muttered.

  “Good,” said Ben. “Then I think we have a chance.”

  chapter thirty-four

  S unday morning felt like spring, as if March had skipped over April and gone straight to May. A gentle breeze wafted a strand of hair across my face as I got out of the cab. After several rigorous shampooings, my hair was back to its original dark red, and while I’d declared the results of my adventures in alternative hair color inconclusive—the Madonna wig left me with sincere doubts as to just how much more fun blondes had, and my experience as a brunette had been too action-packed to offer a valid basis for comparison—it was nice to once again recognize my image in mirrors and other reflective surfaces.

  The streets of Chinatown were thronged with honking cars, and the sidewalks were thronged with pedestrians. I wondered who had decreed that dim sum was a good idea for brunch. I w
as as fond of dumplings as the next person, but to me brunch just wasn’t brunch without Hollandaise and hash browns. Still, when Jake had suggested dim sum it seemed appropriate to feign enthusiasm, so here I was at the corner of Bowery and Canal Street, trying my best to ignore the animal carcasses hanging in the shop windows. As a general rule, the less my food resembled actual living beings the more appealing I found it.

  “Stop rubbing your ear like that,” said a voice in my ear.

  I jumped but managed not to shriek. Being wired was new to me, and I’d temporarily forgotten that Ben was watching from the control center disguised as a delivery van parked nearby.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you,” he added.

  I stopped rubbing at my ear, even though the tiny transmitter planted within itched. Instead, I shoved my hands in my pockets and scanned the scene around me. The knowledge that so many eyes were watching made me feel fidgety, and because they were watching it seemed extra important not to fidget but to maintain an air of cool composure. Peter, especially, had been less than sanguine about Ben’s plan to entrap Jake using me as bait, but I’d assured him I’d be fine with Ben and the colleagues he’d rounded up maintaining constant surveillance. Technically, this was still an offthe-books operation, as the powers that be seemed happy to blame Andrew Marcus for everything, but Ben had convinced a couple of his co-workers to help him out.

  Of course, if we were going to entrap Jake, we also needed him to show up, and he seemed to be running late. I removed a hand from my pocket in order to check my watch. “It’s ten past twelve,” said Ben’s voice in my ear. I returned my hand to my pocket and resumed trying not to fidget.

  A few more minutes passed before Ben spoke again. “Is that him? On the southwest corner? About to cross Canal?”

  I checked out the southwest corner, squinting against the bright sunlight, but I saw nobody who even resembled Jake.