Lifeguard

by James Patterson

  Now what are you going to do about it? How are you going to hold on to Ellie Shurtleff?

  Chapter 83

  THE WINDOW WAS OPEN, the moon was bright, and a breeze coming off the ocean was softly brushing us like a fan. We curled up against the pillows, too exhausted to move.

  Not just from each other, from the three times Ellie and I had made love, but from the stress of all that had happened. And now, being there with Ellie. For a moment, feeling a million miles away from the case, I leaned my head against her shoulder.

  “So, what do we do now?” I asked, Ellie balled up in my arms.

  “You do what Sol said,” she answered. “You get yourself a great lawyer. You stay out of trouble for a change. Tend to your case. With what they have on you, Ned, with a clean record, you’re looking at maybe a year—eighteen months, max.”

  “You’ll wait for me, Ellie?” I tickled her, teasing her with pillow talk.

  She shrugged. “Unless another case turns up and I meet someone else. This kind of thing, you just never know.”

  We laughed, and I drew her in to me. But I guess it was dawning on me that I was thinking about something else. I was going to jail. And Stratton had manipulated everything. Perfectly.

  “Answer me something—you trust the Palm Beach cops to see this through? Lawson? What about your own outfit, Ellie? Moretti?”

  “There may be someone I can trust,” she said. “A Palm Beach detective. I don’t think he’s under Lawson’s thumb. Or Stratton’s.”

  “I still have a chip to play,” I said. She looked at me, eyes wide. “My father . . .”

  “Your father? You didn’t give him up to the police?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. You?”

  Ellie stared blankly. She didn’t answer, but I could see in her still face that she hadn’t.

  She stared into my eyes. “I’m thinking we’re missing something. What Liz said in the car. Only one painting was stolen. And, ‘You’re the art expert. Why do you think he calls himself Gachet?’”

  “What is it about this Gachet? What’s so special?”

  “It was one of the last paintings van Gogh ever did. In June 1890, only a month before he killed himself. Gachet was a doctor who used to stop in on him, in Auvers. You saw the picture. He’s sitting at a table, in his cap, head resting in his hand. The focus of the painting in those sad, blue eyes . . .”

  “I remember,” I said. “Dave left me a picture of the painting.”

  “His eyes are so remote and haunting,” Ellie went on. “Full of pain and recognition. The painter’s eyes. It’s always been assumed it foretold van Gogh’s suicide. It was bought at auction by the Japanese in 1990. Over eighty million. It was the highest price ever paid for a work of art at the time.”

  “I still don’t get it. Stratton didn’t have any van Goghs.”

  “No,” Ellie said, “he didn’t.” Then I saw this ray of awareness. “Unless . . .”

  “Unless what, Ellie?” I sat up and faced her.

  She chewed on her lip. “Only one painting was stolen.”

  “You gonna let me in on what you’re thinking, Ellie?”

  Ellie smiled at me. “He hasn’t won yet, Ned. Not entirely. He still doesn’t have his painting.” She threw the sheets off her. Her eyes brightened into a smile. “Like Sollie said, Ned. We have work to do.”

  Chapter 84

  TWO DAYS LATER I got permission to fly to Boston. But not for the reason I had hoped. Dave’s body had finally been released by the police. We were burying him, at our local church, St. Ann’s, in Brockton.

  A federal marshal had to accompany me on the trip. A young guy just out of training named Hector Rodriguez. The funeral was out of state, therefore, out of my bail agreement. And I was a flight risk, of course. I already had. Hector was stapled to my side the whole way up.

  We buried Dave in the plot next to my brother, John Michael. Everyone was huddled there, cheeks streaming with tears. I held my mom by the arm. It’s what they say about the Irish, right? We know how to bury people. We know how to hold up. We got used to losing people early in the Bush.

  The priest asked if anyone had any last words. To my surprise, my father stepped forward. He asked for a moment alone.

  He stepped up to the polished cherry casket and placed his hand on the lid. He muttered something softly. What could he be saying? I never wanted this to happen to you, son? Ned shouldn’t have gotten you involved?

  I glanced at Father Donlan. He nodded. I stepped down to the gravesite and stood next to Frank. The rain started to pick up. A cold breeze blew in my face. We stood there for a moment. Frank ran his hand along the casket, never even glancing at me. He took a deep swallow.

  “They needed a go-between, Ned,” my father said, and gritted his teeth. “They needed someone to organize a crew, to do the heist.”

  I turned to him, but he kept staring straight ahead. “Who, Pop?”

  “Not the wife, if that’s what you mean. Or that other chump they killed.”

  I nodded. “I already knew that, Pop.”

  He shut his eyes. “It was supposed to be a layup, Ned. No one was supposed to get hurt. You think I would put Mickey onto anything that was dirty? Bobby, Dee . . . Jesus, Ned, I’ve known her dad for thirty years. . . .”

  He turned to me, and in the thinness of his face, I could see tears. I had never seen my father cry. He looked at me, almost angry. “You think for a second, son, I would’ve ever let them take you?”

  Something cracked in me at that moment. In the pit of my chest. In the rain. With my brother lying there. Call it the loathing that had been building up. My resolve to see him as I did. I felt this powerful salty surge in my eyes. I didn’t know what to do. I reached out and wrapped my hand gently over his, on the casket. I could feel his bony fingers tremble, the terror in his heart. In that moment I felt what it must be like to be scared to die.

  “I know what I’ve done,” he said, straightening, “and I’ll have to live with it. However long that is. Anyway, Neddie”—I saw a hint of a smile—“I’m glad you ended up okay.”

  My voice cracked. “I’m not okay, Pop. Dave’s dead. I’m going to prison. Jesus, Dad, who?”

  He tightened his fist into a hard ball. A breath slowly leaked out, as if he were fighting some oath or vow he’d kept for many years. “I knew him from years ago in Boston. He moved away, though. The move did him good. They needed a crew from out of town.”

  “Who?”

  My father told me the name.

  I stood there for a moment, my chest tight. In a second, everything was clear to me.

  “He wanted a crew from out of town,” my father said again, “and I had one, right?” He finally looked at me. “It was just a payout, Ned. Like going to the bank and they hand you a mil. Split aces, Ned. You know what I mean?”

  He massaged his hand across the polished casket lid, slick with rain. “Even Davey would’ve understood.”

  I moved close and put my hand on his shoulder. “Yeah, Pop, I know what you mean.”

  Chapter 85

  PALM BEACH Detective Carl Breen was sipping a Starbucks on a bench facing the marina across the bridge off Flagler Drive. Ellie turned to him. “I need you to help me, Carl.”

  They stared at the fancy white yachts across the lake, beauties, crews in white uniforms hosing them down.

  “Why me?” Breen asked. “Why not go to Lawson? You and he seem to be buddies.”

  “Great friends, Carl. Stratton, too. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Slip’s okay,” the Palm Beach detective said, and smiled, speaking of Lawson. “He’s just been here a long time.”

  “I’m sure he’s okay,” Ellie said. “It’s who he works for I don’t trust.”

  A gull cawed from a mooring a few feet away. Breen shook his head.

  “You’ve sure come a ways in a couple of weeks since you stumbled into my crime scene. The most sought after suspect in America falls in your lap. Now you’re making
accusations against one of the most important people in town.”

  “Art’s booming, Carl. What can I say? And I wouldn’t have exactly called it ‘falling into my lap.’ I was abducted, remember.”

  Breen raised his palms. “Hey, I actually meant it as a compliment. So, what’s in all this for me?”

  “Biggest bust of your career,” Ellie said.

  Breen let out an amused laugh. He took a last gulp of the coffee and crumpled the cup into a ball. “Okay, I’m listening. . . .”

  “Stratton had Tess McAuliffe killed,” Ellie said, eyes fixed on him.

  “Knew you were going to say that,” Breen sniffed.

  “Yeah? Well, what you probably didn’t know was that Tess McAuliffe wasn’t her real name. It was Marty Miller. And the reason you haven’t been able to find out a thing about her is that she’s from Australia. She was a hooker down there. She was hired to do a job. Stratton.”

  “And where did you get this?” Breen faced her.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Ellie said. “You can have it, too. What does matter is that Dennis Stratton was having an affair with her, and that your own department knows about this and hasn’t done shit. And that he killed his wife in retaliation and pinned the whole mess on her and the bodyguard.”

  “Killed her?” Breen’s eyes shone. “In retaliation for what?”

  “In retaliation for conspiring with Tess. Liz wanted out. She was coming clean with us. Stratton did it. To get rid of her and get the heat off himself.”

  “One thing I still don’t get,” Breen said, nodding cautiously. “You said my department already knew about this relationship, between Tess and Stratton? You want to explain?”

  “Dennis Stratton was seen there, at the Brazilian Court, with Tess on several occasions. I saw a golf tee in his home that matched one found at the murder scene. I ran his picture by the staff of the hotel myself. The PBPD has all this.”

  Breen’s blank expression took Ellie by surprise.

  “This shouldn’t come as a surprise, Carl. You didn’t get this information passed along?”

  “You think if we had, we wouldn’t have followed up on something like that? You don’t think we would’ve been all over Stratton? Lawson, too. I assure you, he hates the arrogant SOB as much as you do.” Breen screwed his eyes into her. “Just who was it that supposedly passed along this information?”

  Ellie didn’t answer. She stared back at him just as blankly. A hollow, sick feeling had swelled in her chest. Everything changed. She had the sensation she was sliding, slowly at first, then faster, against her will.

  “Forget it, Carl,” she muttered, rewinding everything she knew about this case, back to its very first moments.

  Everything had just changed.

  Chapter 86

  IT WAS A LONG, quiet flight back to Florida. Agent Rodriguez and I barely exchanged a word. I had buried my brother. I’d maybe seen my father for the last time. And I was bringing something back with me as well. Something pretty earthshaking.

  The name of the person who’d killed my brother and my closest friends.

  As I came through the Jetway at the Palm Beach airport, I spotted Ellie waiting for me. She was standing apart from the usual crowd of giddy family members welcoming their relatives to the Florida sunshine. She was still on duty, I guess, dressed in a black pantsuit, her hair tied back in a ponytail. She smiled as she saw me, but she looked as though it were the end of a stressful day.

  Hector Rodriguez bent down and took off the monitoring device strapped to my ankle. He shook my hand and wished me luck. “You’re back to being the FBI’s problem now.”

  For a second, Ellie and I just stood there. I could see her reading the stress in my eyes. “You okay?”

  “I’m okay,” I lied. I checked around to see if anyone was watching, then I folded her into her arms. “I have some news.”

  I could feel her face brushing against my chest. For a second, I wasn’t sure who was holding whom. “I have news, too, Ned.”

  “I know who Gachet is, Ellie.”

  Her eyes grew moist and she nodded. “C’mon, I’ll drive you home.”

  I guess I expected her to be completely stunned when on the way back to Sollie’s I told her the name my father had given me. But she just seemed to nod, turning onto Okeechobee.

  “The Palm Beach police never followed up the lead on Stratton,” she said, pulling over and putting the car in park.

  “I thought you informed them,” I said, a little dazed.

  “I did,” Ellie said. “Or I thought so.”

  It took me a second to see where she was going.

  I think until that moment, hiding from the law, trying to prove my innocence, I’d never focused on just how angry I felt. But now I felt it coming on like some storm I couldn’t hold back. Stratton always had someone on the inside. He held all the cards.

  “How do we handle this?” I asked Ellie, cars shooting by.

  “We can get a deposition from your father, but these are law enforcement people, Ned. It’s going to take more than an accusation from a guy who’s got a grudge and whose history isn’t exactly unimpeachable. That’s not exactly proof.”

  “But you got proof.”

  “No, all I got was that someone covered up on the Tess McAuliffe case. If I brought that to my boss, it would barely raise an eyebrow.”

  “I just buried my brother, Ellie. You don’t expect me to just sit here and let Stratton and these bastards get away with it.”

  “No, I don’t expect that, Ned.”

  I saw a look of resolve in her soft blue eyes. The look said, I need you to help me prove this, Ned.

  And all I said was “I’m in.”

  Chapter 87

  IT TOOK ELLIE two days to get the proof.

  It was like looking at a painting from a different angle, the prism turned upside down. Every image, every piece of light refracted differently. She knew that whatever she came up with, everything depended on this. She’d better be sure.

  First, she went into the PBPD file on the murder-suicide involving Liz Stratton. There was a NIBIN search in there, tracing the history of the gun. As Lawson had suspected, it matched up positively as one of the weapons used in the massacre of Ned’s friends in Lake Worth. It also made the case against Liz and the bodyguard appear pretty airtight.

  She flipped the page.

  The Beretta .32 had been confiscated in a drug bust two years before by a joint operation of the Miami-Dade County Police Department and the FBI. It had been held in a police evidence bin in Miami and had been part of a weapons cache that had mysteriously disappeared a year before.

  Paul Angelos, the murdered bodyguard, was a former Miami cop. Why would someone on Stratton’s payroll be carrying a dirty gun?

  Ellie looked back for the officers who had been assigned to the Miami case. She figured Angelos’s name would be there, but it was the name at the bottom of the page that made her freeze.

  This could be happenstance, she told herself. What she needed was solid proof.

  Next, she started digging into the background of Earl Anson, the guy who had killed Ned’s brother up in Brockton. How would he find his way to Stratton?

  Anson had been a longtime criminal from down in Florida. Armed robbery, extortion, trafficking in drugs. He’d spent time in Tampa and Glades prisons. But what puzzled her was that for both prison stints, despite a spotty record, he was bumped up for early parole. A four-to-six for robbery bargained down to fourteen months. A second-offense felony tossed to time served.

  Anson knew someone on the inside.

  Ellie called up the warden’s office at Glades, a max to medium institution about forty miles west of Palm Beach. She managed to get Assistant Warden Kevin Fletcher on the line. She asked him how Earl Anson had qualified twice for early release.

  “Anson,” Fletcher said, punching up his record, “didn’t I read he just get waxed up in Boston?”

  “You won’t be seeing him a third time, i
f that’s what you mean,” Ellie confirmed.

  “No loss there,” the assistant warden sighed, “but someone seemed to be pretty tight with him. He had a sugar daddy.”

  “Sugar daddy?” Ellie said.

  “Someone who was protecting him, Agent Shurtleff. And not for what he was giving up in here. My guess? He was someone’s CI.”

  Someone’s informant.

  Ellie thanked Fletcher, but now she felt stymied. Finding out who was handling a CI would be impossible without running up a bright red flag.

  So she tried another tack. She called a friend, Gail Silver, in the Miami District Attorney’s Office.

  “I’m looking into an ex-con named Earl Anson. He was a hit man in this art heist I’m working on. I was hoping you could get me a list of trials he was a testifying witness at?”

  “What is he, some kind of rent-a-witness?” Gail kidded her.

  “CI,” Ellie said. “I’m trying to see if he had any connections to fences or art rings that I could track these paintings through.” Not entirely a lie.

  “What are you looking for?” the ADA replied, seeming to treat her request as routine.

  “Defendants, convictions . . . ,” Ellie said casually. She held her breath. “Case agents, Gail . . . if you’re able to provide that, too.”

  Chapter 88

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON Ellie knocked on Moretti’s office door. She caught her boss leafing through a file, and he grudgingly waved her in. “Something to report?”

  Things had gone from bad to worse with Special Agent in Charge Moretti. Clearly, he felt upstaged, shown up after Ned’s arrest, by the little art agent who was suddenly getting all the publicity.

  “I’ve been looking into something,” Ellie said at the door. “Something’s come up I’m not sure what to do with. On the art.”

  “Okay,” Moretti leaned back, shifting a file.