The Chairman

by Stephen Frey

  “Or arrange for the trigger to be pulled?”

  “Not if it really came down to it.”

  They were silent for a few minutes.

  “Isabelle still upstairs?” Stiles asked.

  “Yeah.” Gillette looked up. “By the way, did your guy get to Canada yet?”

  “I’m expecting his call soon.” Stiles said, checking his watch. “So, how was your night?”

  Gillette smiled. “Excellent. A lot of fun, and no sharp blades in the back. Imagine that.”

  Stiles put his hands underneath his head and shut his eyes as Gillette walked out. “Yeah, imagine that.”

  Pepper Billups had been working with Stiles and QS Security for three years.

  Like Stiles, Billups had been Secret Service but was now enjoying the private sector. The money was better—if you were willing to work the hours—and there was more satisfaction. Even on days like this, when he’d just finished flying eight hours straight. First from New York to Calgary on a Gulfstream V, then from Calgary to Amachuck on a little King Air through some rough turbulence.

  The trick to days like this was being able to sleep on any kind of equipment in any kind of weather. Before joining the Secret Service, Billups had been an Air Force pilot flying the big cargo planes—C-5s and C-130s. He’d been through his share of bad storms, especially during long flights like the ones from Delaware to Guam. During those flights, the crew would take turns at the controls, catching a few hours sleep strapped to a cot in the back with the cargo. If your turn to sleep came while you were flying through the massive thunderclouds that built up over the Pacific in the summer months, so be it. It was sleep or exhaustion, so he’d figured out how to sleep. Compared to some of those flights, a King Air and turbulence over Canada was a day in the park.

  Billups descended the steps of the small prop plane in the darkness of the early morning, bundled up in his parka against the freezing cold. As he reached the snowy, windblown tarmac, he was approached by a short, wiry man sporting a ski hat and a full beard.

  “Ernie Grant?” Billups asked.

  “That’d be me. You must be Pepper Billups.”

  A grin spread across Billups’s wide face. “How could you possibly tell?”

  “When my contact said you were black, I told him I didn’t need any further description. We don’t get many of you guys up here. No offense,” he added.

  “None taken,” Billups assured the other man, who seemed friendly enough.

  “Follow me,” Grant called loudly over the wind, turning and heading for a Jeep that was barely visible, twenty yards away, in the gray light.

  Billups followed Grant to the idling Jeep, slamming the door shut after he’d hopped inside. Shivering. Glad it was warm inside. “Christ,” he said, rubbing his nose. “What the hell’s going on?” It felt like someone had sprayed Novocain in his nostrils.

  “The inside of your nose is frozen,” Grant explained. “Couple of seconds and it’ll thaw out. From now on, if you have to run while you’re outside, cover your nose with your arm.”

  “Right.” Come to think of it, he’d seen Grant do that as he sprinted for the Jeep. “So, let me get this straight, you’re a big-game guide?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of big game do you have up here?”

  Grant gunned the Jeep’s engine and peeled out toward a gap in the chain-link fence surrounding the tiny airport. “My specialty is reindeer. Guys come from everywhere for ’em.” He smirked. “I guess there’s something about blowing away Rudolph. I don’t get it, but these guys love it.”

  Billups grunted. He didn’t get it, either. “You were with the Mounties, right?”

  “Yeah, until about five years ago when I got into the guiding thing. There’s a lot more money in that.”

  “But you trained with Quentin Stiles at some point, right?” The Jeep’s engine was loud, so they had to yell to hear each other. “At Glynco or something.” Stiles always seemed to know someone from somewhere. The guy was amazing.

  “Yup.”

  “Well, I appreciate you helping us out.”

  “Glad to do it. First we’ll stop at the garage and look at the truck, then we’ll go over to the police station and you can see the body. Okay?”

  “Sounds good.”

  Ten minutes later, Grant pulled up in front of what looked like an abandoned building. It was next to a church that wasn’t in great shape either. “This it?” Billups asked skeptically.

  “Yeah. Come on,” Grant called, climbing out of the Jeep and heading across the snow toward the building.

  Billups covered his mouth and nose with his arm and followed. A door in front opened as they neared the building, and he hurried inside after Grant, stamping on the cement floor to get the snow off his boots. To his surprise, the inside of the garage, though messy, was warm and modernly outfitted.

  “Which way, Marcel?” Grant asked a small man in greasy overalls.

  Marcel gave Billups the once-over, then waved for both of them to follow him. He led them to the back of the shop and a Ford Explorer. “Some guys coming down from the oil fields found it abandoned out near Lake McKenzie. We towed it back in.”

  “Where’s Lake McKenzie?” Billups asked Grant.

  “About fifty miles north of town. What was wrong with it, Marcel?” Grant asked, turning toward the little man and pointing at the SUV.

  Marcel shrugged. “Don’t know. The guys who found it said the battery was dead, but I haven’t looked at it yet.” He hopped in behind the steering wheel and turned the key. Nothing happened.

  “Yep,” Grant said. “Battery.”

  “Or the starter’s gone,” Billups observed.

  Marcel lifted the hood and climbed up on the bumper to get a better look. “But why would the battery die out by Lake McKenzie when the guy was coming down from the oil fields? Why would he turn off the engine, then try to restart it? Even if he was refueling, he wouldn’t have turned the engine off for that long, certainly not long enough for the battery to die.” Marcel leaned under the hood, scanning the engine with a flashlight. “Hold this,” he said, handing Billups the light. “Right here.” He pulled Billups’s hand. “That’s it. Keep it right there.”

  Billups watched the little man lean farther over the engine.

  “That’s strange,” Marcel said, scratching his head with his dirty fingernails.

  “What is?” Grant asked.

  “Give me the flashlight.” Marcel snapped his fingers as he reached back.

  Billups handed it to him.

  A few moments later Marcel jumped down from the bumper.

  “What was it?” Grant asked.

  “Alternator plug was out.”

  “So what?”

  “So the truck was running off the battery the whole time,” Billups answered for Marcel. “It would have kept going for a while, but, when the juice was drained from the battery, the engine died.”

  “The guy driving this thing didn’t know much about engines,” Marcel spoke up. “It’s not like it would have shut down right away. It would have been a gradual thing. The lights would have flickered before going out. It was snowing that night, so the windshield wipers would have gone slower. The engine would have had power surges. Anyone who knows even a little bit about engines would have stopped and seen that the plug had been pulled out.”

  “Pulled?” Billups asked.

  Marcel nodded. “I’m pretty sure.”

  “How can you tell? Maybe it just fell out.”

  “I don’t think so. I plugged it back in, then tried to pull it out. It’s hard to pull out, and there were fingerprints in the grease down there.”

  “You think someone caused this guy’s truck to break down?” Billups asked. “You think it was intentional?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Gillette tossed the apple core in the kitchen trash can, then climbed the stairs to the second floor of the apartment and moved down the hallway toward the master bedroom. Strazzi had
to be responsible for everything. It was the only explanation Gillette could come up with that fit. He scratched his head. It still felt like he was missing something.

  So he went over it again.

  Strazzi had killed Donovan. Actually, based on what Faith had told him, McGuire or one of his men had probably committed the murder—at Strazzi’s direction—undoubtedly in return for Strazzi’s willingness to buy McGuire & Company and give Tom and Vince half the company for free. Strazzi had to be Tom and Vince’s backer. Then he’d put the Dominion scandal in motion to scare Ann Donovan.

  Gillette reached the bedroom doorway. He hesitated, biting his lower lip. But if all that was true, why would Tom McGuire give away Stockman’s affair with Rita Jones? That made absolutely no sense. Knowing about Stockman’s affair was what had enabled Gillette to figure out Dominion, enabled him to force Stockman to tell him that Marcie was involved. And Marcie had told him what was really going on. Knowing what was really going on at Dominion might have enabled him to derail Strazzi’s ultimate objective.

  Most important, there was still Strazzi’s murder to explain.

  Then it hit Gillette. Why the Explorer had been found abandoned fifty miles from the nearest town, tapes still in the front seat. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed the home number of Heidi Franklin, a young Everest associate he hoped had no hidden allegiances.

  A few minutes after leaving Marcel’s garage, Billups and Grant pulled up in front of the town’s tiny police station, which, on rare occasions, also served as the morgue.

  “Hello, Bill,” Grant called as he and Billups came through the front door.

  Bill Harper was chief of police. He and a lone deputy comprised the entire force.

  “Bill, this is Pepper Billups. He’s here from New York to ask a few questions and to look at the body.”

  “Hello, Pepper,” Harper said gruffly, sipping from his coffee mug as he rose and came out from behind the desk.

  “Where is it?” Billups asked.

  “Out back,” Harper replied, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder.

  “Let’s go.”

  Harper glanced at Grant.

  “He’s all right,” Grant said. “A friend of a good friend.”

  Harper grabbed his coat off a hook and led them to the back of the building, then out a creaky door into the cold. They trudged across a small field through the gloom and a foot of snow to a tiny shack. Harper pulled a set of keys from his pocket, fumbling through them for the right one as the wind whipped the snow up. Finally, Harper found the key, inserted it in the lock, and turned.

  It was damn cold up here, Billups thought. And it wouldn’t get much lighter than it already was because they were so far north. The world was a dull gray, as though a volcano had erupted nearby and ash was obscuring the sun. As he followed Grant and Harper into the shack, Billups wondered what in the world possessed people to live up here. They had to be crooks or loners, running from something. Or they were socially incapable. Of course, Ernie Grant seemed to be a good guy.

  Harper flicked on a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. “Right there,” he said, pointing at the body. It was lying on a piece of plywood supported by two sawhorses, and had been draped with a grimy blanket.

  Billups moved slowly across the room and pulled the blanket back, grimacing as the dead man’s face came into view. The eyes and the mouth were wide open. Thanks to the cold there hadn’t been much deterioration. He didn’t like dead bodies. Not like some guys he knew, who were fascinated by them. “Where’d you find him?” Billups wanted to know.

  “Local guy fished him out of Lake McKenzie not more than a quarter of a mile from where the SUV was found,” Harper answered. “For this time of year, finding it was a million-to-one shot. The guy was doing some ice fishing and thought he’d hooked the biggest walleye of his life. Shook him up pretty bad when he saw an arm coming up through the hole instead of a fish.”

  “What are you going to do with him?” Billups asked.

  “Hand him over to the family. They’re coming up tomorrow.”

  “How’d you identify him so fast?”

  “His wallet was still on him.”

  “And he was one of the guys shooting seismic up north?”

  “Yep. In charge of it for Laurel Energy, according to his family.”

  “So that was definitely this man’s SUV I just looked at over at Marcel’s garage?” Billups asked, thinking about how Marcel believed that someone had tampered with the truck.

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you think he got in the lake?” asked Billups.

  “Put there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “With the ice as thick as it is right now, someone would have had to cut a hole in it to get a body in there,” Harper said confidently. “He wouldn’t have just fallen in. Highly unlikely in this scenario.”

  “Aren’t there places where streams or rivers come into or leave the lake? Don’t those areas stay free of ice?”

  “Yeah, at both ends of the lake. Unless it’s really cold. But the north end is a few miles from where his Explorer was found, and it’s through dense woods. I don’t see this guy leaving his truck to traipse through the woods. He’d stay on the road.”

  “Is the south end closer?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “How much?

  “Not far from where the truck was parked.”

  “So maybe he went in at the south end.”

  Harper shook his head. “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “The current flows north to south. I don’t think his body would have drifted upstream.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, it’s possible he could have gotten lost in the storm and gone up to the north end. It was snowing, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Heavily.”

  “So it’s possible?”

  Harper moved up beside Billups. “It’s possible, but I really don’t think it happened that way. Like I said, I think somebody put him in the lake.” Harper pulled the blanket up from the side. “Look at this,” he said, pointing at the dead man’s fingers.

  Billups glanced down. They were smashed. “Ah, Jesus. What happened?”

  “Experience is everything in my line of work,” Harper said. “About four years ago, around this same time, a guy in town named Lennie Mitchell killed his wife. Tossed her in the lake through a hole he’d cut in the ice with a chain saw. Wanted it to look like she’d fallen in. Same way I think whoever killed this man did. Lennie’s wife was a loner. Liked to ice fish by herself. Lennie claimed she went up to the lake by herself one afternoon. Which she did a lot. I knew that. Trouble was, this time she didn’t come back.” Harper paused. “We found her at the south end of the lake a few weeks later and her fingers looked just like this. See, Lennie’d stepped on them over and over as she tried to pull herself out of the hole. He broke every one of them. He admitted that to me back there in the office one Sunday morning. He couldn’t lie to me anymore.” The wind made an eerie sound as it whipped through the shack’s eaves. It sounded like an animal in pain. “I bet if we were to go up to Lake McKenzie and look real hard, we’d find a depression in the ice. A place where somebody cut a hole in it to throw this guy in. It’ll already be iced over, but the depression should still be there.”

  Billups stared at Harper. “Why would someone have killed him? You said his wallet was on him. Was there money in it?”

  “Yeah. And credit cards. It wasn’t a robbery.”

  “Then what was it?”

  Harper shrugged. “To tell you the truth, Mr. Billups, I don’t have a damn clue.”

  Gillette pushed open the bedroom door, expecting to see Isabelle’s form beneath the covers of the king-sized bed. But she wasn’t there. He glanced toward the bathroom. The door was closed. She had to be in there.

  “Isabelle,” he called.

  No answer.

  “Isabelle.”

  Still no answer.

  Gillette moved slowly i
nto the room, listening for sounds from the bathroom—running water, footsteps—but heard nothing.

  “What the hell?”

  As he turned back toward the door, he saw her, knife clenched in both hands. He reeled backward, hands to his face, yelling as she came at him. “Jesus Christ! What are you doing?”

  At that instant, Stiles burst into the room and grabbed Isabelle from behind just as she reached Gillette. They flew past him and tumbled to the floor. Seconds later, Stiles had the knife in one hand and Isabelle’s wrists clasped tightly together behind her back in the other.

  Gillette’s cell phone rang. He glanced at Stiles, who was lounging on the couch, eyes closed. They’d moved back to the study after turning Isabelle over to the police. “Hello.”

  “Christian?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Tom McGuire.”

  “Hello, Tom.”

  “How are you, Christian? Everything okay?”

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Just a question, Christian. That’s all.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hey, have you signed the deal with the investment bankers to do the IPO yet?” McGuire wanted to know.

  “No.”

  “Oh, great.”

  Gillette heard relief in McGuire’s voice. “I’ll probably do that next week.”

  “Let me talk to you one more time about buying the company before you do,” McGuire pleaded. “I have some ideas.”

  What a traitor, Gillette thought to himself. He had no reason to doubt Faith. She’d saved his life. “I don’t think it’s worth either of our—”

  “Please, Christian. Please. You owe me that much.”

  “We’re too far apart in price.”

  “Maybe not as far as you think. I’ve spoken to my backer and I think I can get him to come up.”

  “To five hundred million?”

  “I think so.”

  “So talk.”

  “No, not over the phone. I want to do it in person.”

  “Why?”

  “I want this to be face-to-face, man-to-man.”

  “Where are you, Tom?”

  “My house on Long Island. I hate to ask, but could you come out here? My wife’s going somewhere with her sister today, and I have the kids.”