Hornet's Nest jhabavw-1

by Patricia Cornwell

  He paid the seventy-three-dollar-and-seventy-cent bill, leaving two percent less than his usual fifteen-percent tip, which he figured to the penny on a wafer-thin calculator he kept in his wallet. The waitress had been slow bringing his fourth drink, and being busy was no excuse. He returned to the sidewalk out front, on West Trade Street, and the valets scurried, as they always did. Mauney climbed into his rental black Lincoln Continental, and decided he really was not in the mood to return to his hotel just yet.

  He briefly thought of his wife and her endless surgeries and other medical hobbies, as he cataloged them. What he spent on her in a year was a shock, and not one stitch of it had improved her, really. She was a manikin who cooked and made the rounds at cocktail parties.

  Buried somewhere deep in Mauney's corporate mind were memories of Polly at Sweetbriar, when a carload of Mauney's pals showed up for a dance one Saturday night in May. She was precious in a blue dress, and wanted nothing to do with him.

  The spell was cast. He had to have her that moment. Still, Polly was busy, hard to find, and cared not. He started calling twice a day. He showed up on campus, hopelessly smitten. Of course, she knew exactly what she was doing. Polly had been mentored thoroughly at home, at boarding school, and now at this fine women's college. She knew how men were if a girl acknowledged their attentions. Polly knew how to play hard to get. Polly knew that Mauney had a pedigree and portfolio that she had been promised since childhood, because it was her destiny and her entitlement. They were married fourteen months after their first meeting, or exactly two weeks after Polly graduated cum laude, with a degree in English which, according to her proud new husband, would make her unusually skilled in penning invitations and thank-you notes.

  Mauney could not pinpoint precisely when his wife's many physical complications began. It seemed she was playing tennis, still peppy and enjoying the good fortune he made possible for her, until after their second child was born. Women. Mauney would never figure them out. He found Fifth Street and began cruising, as he often did when he was deep in thought. He began getting excited as he looked out at the night life and thought about his trip tomorrow afternoon. His wife thought he would be in Charlotte for three days. Cahoon and company believed Mauney was returning to Asheville after breakfast. All were wrong.

  While family traveled from the distant airports of Los Angeles and New York, the bereft chief and her sons went through closets and dresser drawers, carrying out the painful task of dividing and disposing of Seth's clothing and other personal effects. Hammer could not look at her late husband's bed, where the nightmare had begun as he got drunk and fantasized about what he could do to really hurt her this time. Well, you did it, Seth. You figured it out. Hammer thought. She folded extra-extra-large shirts, shorts, underwear, socks, and placed them in paper bags for the Salvation Army.

  They made no decision about Seth's valuables, such as his four different Rolex watches, the wedding band that had not fit him in more than ten years, the collection of gold railroad watches that had belonged to his grandfather, his Jaguar, not to mention his stocks, and his cash. Hammer cared nothing about any of it, and frankly expected him to zing her one last time in his will. She had never been materialistic and wasn't about to begin now.

  "I don't know the details about any of his affairs," she said to her sons, who cared nothing about them, either.

  "That figures," said Jude as he removed another suit from a hanger and began folding it.

  "You would think he might have discussed his will with you. Mom."

  Tart of it is my fault. " She closed a drawer, wondering how she could have endured this activity alone.

  "I never asked."

  "You shouldn't have to ask," Jude angrily said.

  "Part of the whole point of living with someone is you share important things with each other, you know? Like in your case, so you could maybe plan for your future in the event something happened to him? Which was a good possibility with his rotten health."

  "I've planned for my own future." Hammer looked around the room, knowing that every molecule within it would have to go.

  "I don't do so badly on my own."

  Randy was younger and angrier. As far as he was concerned, his father had been selfish and neurotic because he was spoiled and made no effort to think about others beyond what function they might have served in his wasteful, rapacious existence.

  Randy, especially, seethed over the way his mother had been treated.

  She deserved someone who admired and loved her for all her goodness and courage. He went over and wrapped his arms around her as she folded a Key West shirt she remembered Seth buying on one of their few vacations.

  "Don't." She gently pushed her son away, tears filling her eyes.

  "Why don't you come stay with us in LA for a while?" he gently said, holding on to her, anyway.

  She shook her head, getting back to the business at hand, determined to get every reminder of Seth out of this house as fast as she could, that she might get on with life.

  "The best thing for me is to work," she said.

  "And there are problems I need to resolve."

  "There are always problems. Mom," Jude said.

  "We'd love it if you came to New York."

  "You know anything about this Phi Beta Kappa key on a chain?" Randy held it up.

  "It was inside the Bible in the back of this drawer."

  Hammer looked at the necklace as if she had been struck. The key was hers, from Boston University, where she had enjoyed four very stimulating years and graduated near the top of her class, with a double major in criminal justice and history, for she believed that the two were inexorably linked. Hammer had grown up with no special privileges or promise that she would amount to much, since she was a girl amid four brothers in a household with little money and a mother who did not approve of a daughter thinking the dangerous thoughts hers did. Judy Hammer's Phi Beta Kappa key had been a triumph, and she had given it to Seth when they had gotten engaged. He wore it for a long time, until he began to get fat and hateful.

  "He told me he lost it," Hammer quietly said as the telephone rang.

  West felt terrible about bothering her chief again. West apologized on the cellular phone inside her police car, as she sped downtown. Other units and an ambulance roared to the heart of Five Points, where another man from out of town had been brutally slain.

  "Oh Lord," Hammer breathed, shutting her eyes.

  "Where?"

  "I can pick you up," West said over the line.

  "No, no," Hammer said.

  "Just tell me where."

  "Cedar Street past the stadium," West said as she shot through a yellow light.

  "The abandoned buildings around there. Near the welding supply company. You'll see us."

  Hammer grabbed her keys from the table by the door. She headed out, not bothering to change out of her gray suit and pearls. Brazil had been driving around, in a funk, when he'd heard the call on the scanner. He got there fast, and now was standing beyond crime-scene tape, restless in jeans and T-shirt, frustrated because no one would let him in. Cops were treating him as if he were a reporter no different than others out foraging, and he didn't understand it.

  Didn't they remember him in uniform, out with them night after night, and in foot pursuits and fights?

  West rolled up seconds before Hammer did, and the two women made their way to the overgrown area where a black Lincoln Continental was haphazardly parked far off Cedar and First Streets, near a Dumpster.

  The welding company was a looming Gothic silhouette with dark windows.

  Police lights strobed, and in the far distance a siren wailed as misfortune struck in another part of the city. A Norfolk Southern train loudly lumbered past on nearby tracks, the engineer staring out at disaster.

  Typically, the car was rented, and the driver's door was open, the interior bell dinging, and headlights burning. Police were searching the area, flashguns going off and video cameras rolling. Br
azil spotted West and Hammer coming through, reporters moiling around them and get ting nothing but invisible walls. Brazil stared at West until she saw him, but she gave him no acknowledgment. She did not seem inclined to include him. It was as if they had never met, and her indifference ran through him like a bayonet. Hammer did not seem aware of him, either. Brazil stared after them, convinced of a betrayal. The two women were busy and overwrought.

  "We're sure," Hammer was saying to West.

  "Yes. It's like the others," West grimly said as their strides carried them beyond tape, and deeper inside the scene.

  "No question in my mind. MO identical."

  Hammer took a deep breath, her face pained and outraged as she look at the car, then at the activity in a thicket, where Dr. Odom was on his knees, working. From where Hammer stood, she could see the medical examiner's bloody gloves glistening in lights set up around the perimeter. She looked up as the Channel 3 news helicopter thudded overhead, hovering, its camera securing footage for the eleven o'clock news. Broken glass clinked under feet as the two women moved closer, and Dr. Odom palpated the victim's destroyed head. The man had on a dark blue Ralph Lauren suit, a white shirt missing its cufflinks, and a Countess Mara tie. He had graying curly hair and a tan face that might have been attractive, but now it was hard to tell. Hammer saw no jewelry but guessed that whatever this man had owned wasn't cheap. She knew money when she saw it.

  "Do we have an ID?" Hammer asked Dr. Odom.

  "Blair Mauney the third, forty-five years old, from Asheville," he replied, photographing the hateful blaze- orange hourglass spray-painted over the victim's genitals. Dr. Odom looked up at Hammer for a moment.

  "How many more?" he asked in a hard tone, as if blaming her.

  "What about cartridge cases?" West asked.

  Detective Brewster was squatting, interested in trash scattered through briars.

  "Three so far," he answered his boss.

  "Looks like the same thing."

  "Christ," said Dr. Odom.

  By now, Dr. Odom was seriously projecting. He continually imagined himself in strange cities, at meetings, driving around, maybe lost. He thought of suddenly being yanked out of his car and led to a place like this by a monster who would blow his head off for a watch, a wallet, a ring. Dr. Odom could read the fear the victims had felt as they begged not to die, that huge. 45 pointed and ready to fire. Dr. Odom was certain that the soiled undershorts consistent in each case were not postmortem. No goddamn way. The slain businessmen didn't lose control of bowels and bladder as life fled and bled from them. The guys were terrified, trembling violently, pupils dilated, digestion shutting down as blood rushed to extremities for a fight or flight that would never happen. Dr. Odom's pulse pounded in his neck as he unfolded another body bag.

  West carefully scanned the interior of the Lincoln as the interior alert dinged that the driver's door was ajar and the lights were on.

  She noted the Morton's doggie bag, and the contents of the briefcase and an overnight bag that had been dumped out and rummaged through in back. US Bank business cards were scattered over the carpet and she leaned close and read the name Blair Mauney III, the same name on the driver's license Detective Brewster had shown her.

  West pulled plastic gloves out of her back pocket.

  She worked them on, so consumed by what she was doing, that she was unaware of anyone around her or the tow truck that was slowly rolling up to haul the Lincoln to the police department for processing. West had not worked crime scenes in years, but she had been good at it once. She was meticulous, tireless, and intuitive, and right now she was getting a weird feeling as she looked at the clutter left by the killer. She lifted a US Air ticket by a corner, opening it on the car seat, touching as little of it as possible as her misgivings grew.

  Mauney had flown to Charlotte from Asheville today, arriving at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport at five-thirty p. m. The return, for tomorrow afternoon, was not back to Asheville, but to Miami, and from there Mauney was flying to Grand Cayman, in the West Indies. West carefully flipped through more tickets, her heart picking up, adrenalin coursing. He was scheduled to fly out of Grand Cayman on Wednesday, and stop over in Miami for six hours. Then he would return to Charlotte, and, finally, to Asheville. There were more disturbing signs that were likely unrelated to Maundy's murder, but pointed to other crime possibly surrounding his life.

  This was always the bitter irony in such cases, she couldn't help but think. Death ratted on people who were closet drug abusers, drunks, or having affairs with one and/or the other sex, or those who liked to whip or be whipped, or to string themselves up by pulleys and nooses and masturbate. Human creativity was endless, and West had seen it all. She had gotten out a ballpoint pen and was using it to turn pages of other paperwork. Though her forte was not cash and equivalents, treasury and agency securities, derivatives, investment banking, commercial and corporate banking, West knew enough to get a sense of what Mauney might have been intending on his travels.

  In the first place, he had an alias, Jack Morgan, whose picture IDs on passport and driver's license showed Mauney's face. There were a total of eight credit cards and two checkbooks in the names of Mauney and Morgan. Both men seemed to have a keen interest in real estate, specifically a number of hotels along Miami Beach. It appeared to West that Mauney was prepared to invest some one hundred million dollars in these old pastel dumps. Why? Who the hell went to Miami Beach these days? West flipped through more paperwork, perspiring in the humid heat. Why was Mauney planning to drop by Grand Cayman, the money-laundering capital of the world?

  "My God," West muttered, realizing that Grand Cayman was three syllables.

  She stood up, staring at the bright skyline, at the mighty US Bank Corporate Center rising above all, its red light slowly blinking a warning to helicopters and low flying planes. She stared at this symbol of economic achievement, of greatness and hard work on the part of many, and she got angry. West, like a lot of citizens, had checking and savings accounts at US Bank She had financed her Ford through it.

  Tellers were always pleasant and hard-working. They went home at the end of the day and did their best to make ends meet like most folks.

  Then some carpetbagger comes along and decides to cheat, steal, hoodwink, make out like a bandit, and give an innocent business and its people a bad name. West turned her attention to Hammer and motioned to her.

  "Take a look," West said quietly to her chief.

  Hammer squatted by the open car door and examined documents without touching them. She had been making investments and saving money most of her life. She knew creative banking when she saw it, and was shocked at first, then disgusted as truth began to whisper. As best she could tell, and of course none of it could be proven at this precise moment, it appeared Blair Mauney III was behind hundreds of millions of dollars loaned to Domin ion Tobacco that seemed to be linked to a real-estate development group called Southman Corporation, in Grand Cayman. Associated with this were multiple bank account numbers not linked by identification numbers. Several of the same Miami telephone numbers showed up repeatedly, with no description other than initials that made no sense. There were references to something called US Choice

  "What do you think?" West whispered to Hammer.

  "Fraud, for starters. We'll get all this to the FBI, to Squad Four, see what they make of it."

  The news helicopter circled low. The cocooned body was loaded into the ambulance.

  "What about Cahoon?" West asked.

  Hammer took a deep breath, feeling sorry for him. How much bad news did anybody need in one night?

  "I'll call him, tell him what we suspect," she grimly said.

  "Do we release Mauney's ID tonight?"

  "I'd rather hold out until morning." Hammer was staring beyond bright lights and crime-scene tape.

  "I believe you have a visitor," she said to West.

  Brazil was at the perimeter taking notes. He was not in uniform this night, and hi
s face was hard as his eyes met West's and held. She walked toward him, and they moved some distance away from others, and stood on different sides of crime-scene tape.

  "We're not releasing any information tonight," she said to him.

  "I'll just do my usual," he said, lifting the tape to duck under.

  "No." She blocked him.

  "We can't let anybody in. Not on this one."

  "Why not?" he said, stung.

  "There are a lot of complications."

  "There always are." His eyes flashed.

  "I'm sorry," she told him.

  "I've been inside before," he protested.

  "How come now I can't?"

  "You've been inside when you've been with me." West began to back away.

  "When I've…?" Brazil's pain was almost uncontain- able.

  "I am with you!"

  West looked around and wished he would lower his voice. She could not tell him what she had found inside the victim's car, and what it quite likely implied about the not-so-innocent victim Blair Mauney III. She glanced back at Hammer. The chief was still leaning inside the Lincoln, looking through more paperwork, perhaps grateful for the distraction from her own private tragedies. West thought of Brazil's behavior at her house while Raines was watching the videotape. This was a mess, and it could not go on. She made the right decision and could feel the change inside her, the curtain dropping. The end.

  "You can't do this to me!" Brazil furiously went on.

  "I haven't done anything wrong!"

  "Please don't make a scene or I'm going to have to ask you to leave," West, the deputy chief, stated.

  Enraged and hurt, Brazil realized the truth.

  "You're not going to let me ride with you anymore."

  West hesitated, trying to ease him into this.

  "Andy," she said, 'it couldn't go on forever. You've always known that. Jesus Christ. " She blew out in frustration.

  "I'm old enough to… I'm… "

  Brazil backed up, staring at her, the traitor, the fiend, the hard-hearted tyrant, the worst villain ever to touch his life. She didn't care about him. She never had.