"That's right."
"Tell me about him."
I frowned, but then I realized this was her way of testing me, of seeing if I was who I claimed to be. "He's a loud, opinionated old soldier," I said. "And many people probably find him intimidating. He's a lonely man, and he's lonelier now than ever." She winced when I said that.
"He loves his son, he loves his granddaughter, and he loves you," I continued. "He's opened his savings account to me and my partner, just in hopes of finding you, or at least finding out what happened to you. That is his reason for living right now. The last time I saw him, he was sitting on the deck behind your house staring at a snowman your daughter built as if it held everything that was left of his soul."
I hadn't meant to make her feel guilty or sad. I'd simply described John Weston with the first images that came to my mind. By the time I mentioned the snowman, though, Julie Weston was crying softly. She kept her hands clutched against her arms, and the tears slid along her nose and down her cheeks before falling in fat drops to her thighs. I sat across from her, motionless. I wanted to cross the whirlpool, put my arms around her, and tell her everything would be all right. But I knew she wouldn't want me to, and I didn't know if everything would be all right.
She cried for a few minutes, and I kept my mouth shut. If she was going to trust me, she'd have to do it on her own. If she didn't, I was going to have to call Cody and have him send a group of agents out to scoop her up and take her back to Cleveland. That was what I should do. My job had been to find her, and now I'd done that. It was time to turn it over to the feds now and let them have their fun with the rest of it. I didn't move, though. I wanted to hear what she had to say. Eventually, she stopped crying and took a long, shaky breath. Then she lifted her head and looked at me again, the shadows and her damp hair hiding most of her face. Her eyes were visible, though, and they caught me and held me, seeming to look right through me, as if she were searching my soul before determining how to deal with me. When she spoke, her voice was as soft as the rustle of the palm fronds in the breeze above us.
"I need help," she said.
I waited for more, but nothing else came. I nodded. "Then I guess it's a good thing I showed up."
She asked me to show her identification and my investigator's license. It was a pointless routine--IDs can easily be faked, and she'd already decided she had to trust me--but maybe the trivial precaution made her feel better. We went up to her hotel room, and she dried off and pulled a sweatshirt over her swimsuit while I stood in the living room and waited. It was a three-room suite, and the door to the second bedroom was closed. When she came out of the bathroom, she saw me looking at it.
"She's in there," she said, knowing who I was wondering about. She watched me hesitantly, then stepped past me and opened the door. I stayed where I was, but enough light from the bathroom filtered into the bedroom to display the little girl asleep under the covers, her dark hair spilling across the pillow. Betsy Weston. I stared at her for a few seconds.
"I'm glad she's safe," I said, and my voice sounded slightly hoarse.
Julie Weston stood in the doorway, out of the light enough so that I could see into the room, but in my way enough to block me if I tried to move past her. Protective. I turned away, and she closed the door quietly and led me onto the balcony.
"We should talk out here," she said. "I don't want to wake her." She leaned over the rail and looked down at the pool below us. "I should never have gone down," she said. "I was so scared to leave her here alone. But I needed to get out. I had to get away from this damned room. It's been like a prison."
I sat on one of the plastic deck chairs and watched her as she stood with her back to me, looking at the pool. The sweatshirt extended just beyond the bottom of her swimsuit, but the slim, graceful lines of her legs were visible in the shadows. She turned back to me but stayed on her feet, pressing her back against the railing. Then she told the story.
They'd been the perfect family, she said. Happy, healthy, and wealthy. She'd met Wayne while he was working for the Pinkertons. It had been a blind date arranged by one of her friends. They'd gone out once, and at first she thought he'd been a little too arrogant, a little too slick, a little too confident. But he was good-looking, and smart, and charming. So when he called again, asking for a second date, she'd found it hard to refuse. There'd been a second date, and a third, and eventually they'd spent a week in Switzerland, and he'd proposed to her in a beautiful chalet in the mountains. They'd married six months later, and Wayne had taken a risk, leaving behind the benefits of the Pinkertons to set out on his own.
And it had worked. Worked very well, as far as Julie Weston knew. Wayne originally had a partner named Aaron Kinkaid, she told me, but they'd decided to go their separate ways, and her husband had worked alone from then on. I watched her face carefully when she mentioned Kinkaid, but if there was any emotion or passion there, she hid it well.
So the happy marriage lasted, and the career thrived, and the family grew with the addition of their daughter. Wayne was making good money--great money, in fact--and he told her business was good, couldn't be better, there were new clients coming in every day. On their tenth anniversary, he surprised her with a brand-new Lexus. Good-looking, charming, and prone to extravagant gifts, Wayne Weston seemed like the perfect husband. He was the perfect husband, Julie Weston told me. Until one day in February. She smiled at the recollection, but it wasn't the product of emotions one typically associates with a smile. It was hard, cold, and bitter--a smile not at the memory but at her own foolishness, a mocking smile at her own faith that had turned out to be so undeserved.
"He came home early," she said, "and I knew right away something was wrong. Betsy always met him at the door, jumped on him, and hugged him, and he always responded playfully. That night, though, she just seemed to bounce right off him. He gave her an automatic hug and told her to go play in her room before dinner because he had a headache. She went to her room, but I looked at his face and knew right away it wasn't a headache that was bothering him." Her hands tightened on the rail, the knuckles pushing against the skin. "He told me he had a confession to make. And I was standing there in the kitchen, still holding the stupid meat tenderizer in my hand, just staring at him and thinking, 'Whatever it is, we can beat it. If he's having an affair, if he's got cancer, we can get past it.' And then he told me his confession. And it wasn't an affair, and it wasn't cancer. It was worse. He told me he'd been working for a businessman, helping him settle deals and get the best prices. And I said I didn't see what was wrong with that. So he explained it to me."
The cold smile came back again. "He'd been helping him by digging deep in people's private lives and then handing the information over. He shot videotapes of married men having sex with their mistresses, he dug up information on addictions and past psychological problems, on family secrets--anything and everything people were afraid of. And then he handed it over to his boss, and they went to work turning other people's fears into money. My husband," she said flatly, "was nothing more than a blackmailer. That was his profession. To ruin lives, or threaten to ruin lives, so another man could make more money on his business deals or have more pull with the city government."
I sat in silence. I didn't want to tell her that it was not an uncommon practice. I didn't want to tell her that secrets are money in the business world, that fear is leverage, that knowledge is power.
"I never pried about his job," she said. "I knew it was confidential, and the few times I asked questions, that was what he told me. But somehow I'd always imagined that he was nobler, that he was out there solving cases the police couldn't solve, or helping attorneys prepare for legitimate lawsuits. I knew the cheating-spouse cases would come and go, and there would be some unpleasant jobs, but . . . all he did was look for ways to hurt people. That's it. He went to work every day determined to find some dirty secret, some sensitive topic, so another greedy man could make a larger profit."
She sighed a
nd shook her head, then took her hands off the railing and went back to rubbing her arms, even though she couldn't possibly have been cold in the sweatshirt.
"He'd been doing this for years. Working for this one man."
"Jeremiah Hubbard," I said, speaking for the first time since she'd begun her story. She looked at me and smiled.
"Very good," she said. "You obviously do your job well, Mr. Perry. Do the police know, too?"
I shrugged. "We've told them, but I don't know how seriously they took us."
"I see. Well, yes, it was Mr. Hubbard. And then one day, the whole beautiful arrangement fell apart. Wayne told me he'd been shooting video surveillance--using cameras that had been illegally installed, of course--and he'd videotaped a murder."
"A murder?" I said.
"Yes."
"Do you know who was killed? Or who killed him?"
"I don't know any names. Wayne didn't want me to know them."
"Okay," I said, not wanting to distract her from the story. "Go on."
She took a breath and paused, remembering where she had left off. "He'd videotaped a murder. He told me this, and I stared at him, and said, 'So what's the problem? Call the police.' But he said he couldn't. He said the people involved were too dangerous. He said they were professional criminals, part of a national Russian crime syndicate, and we'd have to go into witness protection if we turned the tape over. He said they'd come after all of us, him, me, even Betsy. I couldn't believe it. Witness protection. We'd have to throw our whole lives away." She shook her head vigorously, aggravated by just the memory of the night.
"I told him to call the FBI," she said. "That's what you do in a situation like that, right? If it's too serious for the police, then you call the FBI. And he told me he couldn't do that, because the cameras had been illegally installed. He said he'd committed a crime just to get the videotape. But that was absurd; obviously, the police wouldn't care about something so minor if it solved a murder for them. I told Wayne that, and he said he didn't trust the FBI or the police--the men involved in the murder were too smart, too powerful, too dangerous.
"And," she said, her voice tinged with anger and disgust, "he told me that Mr. Hubbard wouldn't like it." She raised her eyes to me. "Mr. Hubbard wouldn't like it. That's what he said to me. Can you believe that? My husband came home and told me that my daughter and I were now in danger because of his stupidity, because of his greed, and why couldn't we go to the police? Because the rich bastard who'd put him up to it wouldn't like it. He wouldn't like it." She spat the words out like they were something foul in her mouth.
"He told me that, and I just stood there and stared at him. I was still holding the damned meat tenderizer, just standing there at the counter, listening to my husband explain how our lives were falling apart. And, eventually, I asked him what we were going to do."
Her eyes seemed to grow distant as she looked at me. "I bet you're dying to hear that part, aren't you? I bet you'd love to know the master plan."
"I'd like to hear it."
"Great," she said. "I'd love to tell it. It's all worked out so perfectly, you know." The sarcasm in her voice rivaled anything uttered by Jerry Seinfeld or George Carlin. "He told me he was afraid the Russians already knew about the tape."
"How?"
"I have no idea. I asked him that, too, but he ignored me. He said we were in danger now, that we had to run. He said Hubbard was going to give him enough money to get away. And all of this is happening so fast. I mean, I'd just come home from the grocery store. I'd bought a week's worth of groceries, and now I was being told to run for my life."
"So you came here?"
She nodded. "It was supposed to be temporary, though. A stopover. Wayne said he wanted me to take Betsy and leave. He'd stay an extra day, work out the money arrangements with Hubbard, talk to his father, and fly down to join us. From here, we were supposed to go to South America. He had a job all worked out. He was going to be a scuba-diving instructor for some sort of resort. He told me it would be great, living in paradise, waking up each morning for walks on the beach." She shook her head sadly. "Paradise. That's where we were going to go."
"So he told you this, and you left the same night?"
"No. This was the day before we left. He thought we had a little time. We had dinner and put Betsy to bed and then stayed up all night talking about it. As scared as I was, it sounded like the best option. If we stayed in the city, we were going to be killed. If we entered witness protection, we'd hand our lives over to the government. They'd tell us where to live; Wayne would be given a job at Wal-Mart or something like that. But if we did it Wayne's way and didn't go to the police, then Hubbard would pay for us to leave. He'd give us plenty of money to create a new life."
"What about your family?" I asked, thinking about John Weston and the agony he was suffering.
"I'm an only child, and so was Wayne," she said. "My parents are dead. I was going to be leaving some good friends behind, of course, but as far as family it was just Wayne's father and a few cousins. Wayne was going to tell his dad. But someone murdered him first." Her voice broke a little when she said that, and I could tell that despite all the shock and disappointment her husband had provided her, she still loved him.
"What happened that night?" I said. "The night Wayne was killed." She rubbed her fingertips against her temples, trying to drive away the beginning of a headache, maybe, or perhaps the lingering of a memory.
"He came home nervous," she said. "He was real scared that afternoon. He came home and took me right into the bedroom. He told me he thought the Russians knew about him. He said I had to take Betsy and leave that night. He'd leave the house but stay in the city, and he'd talk to his father the next day and finalize the arrangements with Hubbard. He'd rented a car using false identification, and he piled us into it and told us to drive to Columbus. He didn't want us to use the Cleveland airport, so he'd arranged for a flight to Myrtle Beach from Columbus. He said Randy knew everything, and he'd take care of us. Randy was Wayne's closest friend. His most trusted friend." Her voice was a clipped monotone now, an obvious effort to hide all emotion while she told the story.
"We flew into town, and Randy picked us up at the airport," she said. "He told me not to worry, that he would take care of us until Wayne came down and we left. But the next afternoon we still hadn't heard from Wayne, and I was starting to get nervous. Then Randy came up to the room and told me Wayne had been murdered. He'd found a story about it on the Cleveland newspaper's Web site."
She stopped talking. I said, "And?"
"And?"
I raised my eyebrows. "And what the hell have you been doing since then? It's been days."
"I wanted to call the police right away. I figured I could tell them everything, and we wouldn't be in any danger. But Randy told me not to. He said the Russians were still going to be looking for us, because they knew we were alive, and they knew we could testify against them. And he didn't trust the police or the FBI for the same reasons Wayne hadn't--he thought Hubbard could pull strings. So we stayed here, waiting to see what the police would turn up. When it was obvious they weren't producing anything, Randy went to Cleveland to sort it out."
"Sort it out?" I said. "How?"
She frowned. "By killing the Russians, maybe? By killing Hubbard? By killing everyone involved? I don't know, but I'm sure that's what he had in mind. Randy is a very dangerous man in his own right, Mr. Perry. I've known him for years, and I'll admit he still scares me. I know he would never hurt Betsy or me, but I'm certainly not comfortable around him. After we found out Wayne had been killed, Randy made it clear he was in charge. I didn't argue. I was scared, and alone, and I had no one else to turn to. He told me he'd go to Cleveland and be back in a few days."
"So you let him go."
She pushed her hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ears. "What was I supposed to do? Stop him? Argue with him?" She shook her head. "You've obviously never met Randy Hartwick."
&
nbsp; "I met him," I said. "For about ten seconds, until someone put a bullet through his chest."
She lifted her hand halfway to her lips and held it there, frozen, her mouth open and her eyes wide. "Randy's dead?"
"Randy's dead. That's what led me here. I wasn't expecting to find you; I was just trying to find out more about him."
She eased slowly into the plastic deck chair beside me, as if this last bit of news had extinguished the final flickering embers that had fueled her.
"So the Russians killed your husband?" I said, knowing she wasn't up to more questioning but still trying to sort out the details.
She swiveled her head and met my eyes, "No. The Russians did not kill my husband. Whoever killed him made it look like a suicide, Mr. Perry."
"Lincoln."
"Whoever killed him made it look like a suicide, Lincoln. The Russians would never have been able to get inside our home to do that. Wayne was too smart for that."
"So who do you think killed him?"
"Jeremiah Hubbard," she said flatly, as if there were no room for doubt in her mind.
I didn't know about that, but I didn't argue with her. It was easy to believe Hubbard might have been involved in Weston's death, but I had trouble imagining the aging real estate mogul doing his own gun handling.
"So you've stayed hidden in this hotel," I said, "because Hartwick told you not to go to the police?"
"That was my decision," she said firmly. "My life as I knew it is over. I understand that, and I have to accept it. My husband has angered the most dangerous group of men in the country. They will kill my daughter and me if they can find us. Jeremiah Hubbard will do the same. If we go to the police, we will be placed in witness protection and forced into whatever life they decide to give us. That is not how I will raise my daughter. But I also can't let the world believe Wayne killed Betsy and me like they've been saying on the news. And I can't let Jeremiah Hubbard get away with this."
"So what are you planning to do?" I asked.
Tonight I Said Goodbye (St. Martin's Minotaur Mystery) Page 16