“So that’s your plan? To keep things quiet and hope no one hears about it until they’re having their egg-white omelets for breakfast?”
“My plan is to keep things quiet until morning. That’ll give me enough time to try to figure out what to do. I don’t think it’ll help anything if we wake people up in the middle of the night to spread the news.”
“Except me, you mean.”
“The only advantage we have right now is that we’re the only ones who know about it—except for the killer. I don’t know how to use that advantage yet, but I don’t see the value in having H. R. Harmon trying to tell me how to run this investigation at three a.m. And if it’ll make you feel better, I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep either.”
He could practically hear Leona’s brain working as she tried to figure out the political and PR ramifications of the crime she’d just been alerted to. He figured she didn’t come to any satisfactory conclusions because all she said was, “I have to let Silverbush know. I can’t keep him out of the loop for something like this.”
“All right.”
“I know you don’t like it, but this isn’t something you can run as a one-man show.”
“I understand.”
“I’ll sell you to Silverbush, Jay, don’t worry about that. You won’t be left out of this thing, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about, Leona. I’m worried about solving a murder.”
Again, he could almost hear her thinking, figuring out what she was going to say to the attorney general, deciding how hard she was going to push her own chief of police. “Jay, we’re going to have to trust Silverbush now, and I think we can. But I can trust you on this one, right? You know what you’re doing?”
Justin couldn’t help himself, his eyes shifted to glance toward the stairs. The whiff of Abby’s shampoo still lingered. He shrugged, said, “Sure, I know what I’m doing,” and hung up the phone.
For the next four hours, he did his best to prove that he did indeed know what he was doing. He programmed his iTunes library on his computer to play two Tom Petty albums, Wildflowers and Greatest Hits, Patti Smith’s version of “When Doves Cry” four times in a row, and then Mingus Plays Piano. He turned the volume on low so he wouldn’t disturb Abigail, but he needed music right now. He worked better with the right music, thought better with the right music. Music helped him focus at the same time it could keep his mood constant. Right now he wanted to keep his mood unwaveringly somber, and he had to stay as focused as he’d ever been. Definitely Petty, Smith, and Mingus.
Sitting at the computer set up in his living room, he signed onto PublicInfoSearch.com, a pay site he’d authorized all EEHPD cops to use. There were nine categories of available searches: Background, People, Criminal, Bankruptcies & Liens, Sex Offenders, Property, Marriage, Death, and Divorce. He went to “People,” typed in “Evan Harmon,” and printed up anything he thought might be relevant about the man’s background and activities over the past few years, professional as well as social. There was material quoted from a biography of Evan’s father that talked briefly about Evan’s school years. He’d grown up in New Hampshire and gone to two New England prep schools. The first was one of the elite academies in the country, Melman Prep. Evan had transferred out of Melman when he was a junior in high school. Curious. Justin was not unfamiliar with that world and he knew that “transfer” was another word for expulsion. Or failure. People like Evan Harmon did not transfer from a top school to a lesser one unless they were forced to. The writer of the book also had the same suspicion—but Evan’s records were sealed and the biographer could not get them. There was speculation about getting some girl pregnant, something about a violent episode with another student, but neither could be validated. Justin dismissed both things as rumors, stuck in to sell a not very commercial book, but he made note of the school change. And he made a note to check it out. Patterns. Even those from twenty years ago counted.
Evan’s college years were uneventful. He didn’t get into an Ivy League school, went instead to a small private college in Connecticut, Connecticut University, which Justin knew was mostly populated by rich kids who couldn’t study their way or buy their way onto better campuses. Justin remembered that in his day the college was known as FUU—Fuck-Up University. But Evan hadn’t seemed to fuck up too badly. He graduated with a decent average and no more possible scandals.
Going chronologically, there was some simple information on Evan’s early career at Merrill Lynch, some bare-bones material about four years he spent working at Rockworth and Williams, the same money management firm that Ellis St. John worked at. Justin began jotting down a few names, nothing in depth, nothing that gave him a great feel for what was going on, but connections were being formed and he was a big believer in patterns and connections. If there was one thing he’d learned since he’d become a cop, it’s that the world might function in random and unpredictable ways, but within that disorder people managed to impose their own repetitive behavior. The world made no sense, Justin had long ago determined, but people did. Or at least their patterns were remarkably consistent. In a crazy world, everyone—the good guys and the bad—attempted to bring some sanity, usually in the form of regulation, to their actions. And it was that attempt that got the bad guys caught every time. So Justin looked for patterns. Even before he searched for motives.
Justin was beginning to get a vague feel for Evan Harmon. Again, nothing substantial, and of course he knew a bit about the man from Abby. He instinctively didn’t like Harmon. He didn’t seem connected to something that Justin cared very much about—productivity. A picture was slowly forming of someone distant and cold, someone removed from the give-and-take of everyday human relationships. He thought about Abby’s relationship with her husband, about her constant attempts to avoid and escape from that relationship. He wondered how much she knew about Evan’s past. For that matter, he wondered what she could possibly know about Evan’s present. Well, he didn’t actually have a present any longer. As of last night, Evan Harmon existed only in the past.
There was a decent amount of information on Ascension, Harmon’s hedge fund company. Justin scanned the company’s history, jotted down a few key names, and printed the whole thing, knowing he’d eventually have to pay closer attention to the details. In these details, he was certain, were the answers to many of his questions.
The last thing he saw was a photo of Evan Harmon, dated two years earlier. It showed Evan playing in the yearly Hamptons celebrity softball game. The game was played every July in East Hampton. Writers, artists, musicians, and rich people who had muscled into the celebrity crowd got together to raise money for medical research into leukemia. Each year the game raised about fifty thousand dollars, but it had become a competitive sports event. The rich and famous slid hard and ran fast, and the occasional fight even broke out over an umpire’s call. The photo showed Evan at home plate, swinging at a pitch. His stance was good, his balance looked professional. He looked like an athlete. Most of all he looked alive.
Justin didn’t feel great about it, but he also ran a search on Abby Harmon. Most of the clippings had to do with Abby’s impact on the social scene—raising money for charities, being seen late at night in clubs without Evan but with some rich or famous tabloid star, hosting politicians busy raising money and wooing votes in the Hamptons or in Manhattan. He knew some of her history but read carefully what was on the screen. He knew the reason for his scrutiny, and he felt a little guilty about it—he wanted to see how much of what she’d told him of her past jibed with what was on the record in front of him. He told himself that he was just looking to verify that she’d been honest with him about the past as a way of justifying his trust in the truthfulness of her version of the previous night’s events. But somehow that didn’t make him feel a whole lot less guilty.
As he read, he nodded, pleased, because there was nothing in print that went against what she’d told him of her
history. Abigail Marbury had grown up in Chicago and had come from money. Her family probably had more money than the Harmons but not nearly the same social standing. Abigail’s father had started as a salesman, working the floor of a small store that sold household appliances. The owners were elderly and no longer interested in increasing their fortune so, after a few years, they sold the store to Regis Marbury and happily retired. Regis was anything but satisfied with his lot. Aggressive and savvy and educated about the latest advancements in the field, he made a minor name change and turned one Appliance Heaven store into a string of Heaven Hardware outlets. It took him a little over a decade to have the biggest hardware chain in the Midwest. It took him two years after that to have a massive coronary and drop dead at the blue-ribbon opening of his latest store in St. Louis. He was forty-nine years old when he died; his only daughter was seventeen. Abigail tried college after her father’s death, the University of Michigan, but lasted only two years before she dropped out and came to New York City. She was beautiful and adventurous and didn’t have much trouble getting work as a model. She spent those years doing drugs and hanging out with rock stars and actors and getting photographed in every hot spot imaginable. Justin and she had talked about those days because she’d been reminiscing with a mixture of fondness and distaste. He’d asked her how she could have spent so much time doing little but fucking and drugging and being mindless. She’d looked up at him and said, “I liked fucking and drugging and being mindless. I still like it,” and Justin had to agree that it wasn’t all bad. But then he said, “But that’s all you were doing,” and she said, “I know. It’s why I stopped. My life got boring. My friends got boring.” The way she said it—a distance and coldness in her eyes and voice—made Justin wonder when it would be that she looked at him and said, “You bore me now, too.” He decided that she probably would say that to him at some point. And he also decided he didn’t really care; he didn’t bore her now and that was fine with him.
The material on her marriage to Evan was fairly standard: the ceremony was tabloid fodder and the honeymoon was bliss, and Justin knew from their talks that within six months they were both having affairs and going their own separate ways. Evan Harmon and Abigail Marbury never seemed to actually be in love with each other. They’d crossed paths at a moment when both were bored with the lives they were leading and both thought the other person would provide some combination of excitement and stability. Neither happened. But neither did divorce. It was easier to stay together. And Abby told him once that, no matter the arena or the situation, she and her husband were both people who tended to do whatever was easiest.
Remembering that conversation made him feel on edge. Sometimes people thought that murder was easy.
Justin closed out the windows on Abby and moved on to Evan’s father. There were probably a thousand pages of available material on Herbert Randolph Harmon. Justin printed up just some of the highlights. H. R., as he was often referred to, had used his family connections—his wife’s money and his father-in-law’s business, a leather tannery that he ran after the father-in-law’s retirement—to become both wealthy and a political force in New England. He had never been perceived as being interested in the public at large or being interested, in fact, in anything but adding to his own wealth and prestige, but he surprised everyone who knew him when he turned thirty-five and ran for the New Hampshire congressional seat being vacated by the Republican who’d held it for eighteen years. H. R. served two terms in Congress, neither distinguishing himself nor embarrassing himself, then his higher aspirations took over and he ran for the Senate. It was a close race and, in the end, one that turned bitter and nasty. What public reputation H. R. had was largely based on his seemingly unshakable decency and civility. But when it looked as if he was going to lose the election, he had no compunction about diving into the political sewer. Or, rather, getting his handlers to dive in for him and take care of the dirty work. The tough-guy strategy backfired, however. As the campaign grew mean, H. R.’s jovial facade crumpled and a nastier foundation was exposed. That didn’t sit well with voters. It also exacerbated the fact that underneath that facade was very little substance, at least when it came to issues that mattered with the voters. The voting was close, but H. R. lost the election. As 1982 ended, at age forty-seven, he was back in the private sector, but it didn’t take long for him to become one of those hard-to-define political hangers-on. For years he had no real connection to Washington other than his ability to rouse other rich political hangers-on and spur them into financial action. He supported conservative candidates who came up to campaign in his state; raised money for national figures; began to be quoted in local newspapers and then national magazines, espousing conservative causes; and eventually emerged as a party spokesperson. By the mid-eighties he was back in the inner circle and in 1985 was appointed the U.S. representative to the United Nations. For three years he threw elegant parties and was briefed on the politics of many countries he’d previously never heard of, and then in 1988 became the president’s choice for secretary of commerce. His main order of business was helping to develop trade relations with China, which he did efficiently and seamlessly. In 1992, when his party was voted out of office, H. R. returned to the business world. He was lured to Wall Street by Lincoln Berdon, the venerable head of the even more venerable firm of Rockworth and Williams—there it was again, Justin noted—which is where H. R. was ensconced for most of the next decade, his wealth quickly soaring to another level. While he was reading, Justin couldn’t help but think of John Huston’s line in Chinatown, about buildings, whores, and millionaires all becoming respectable when they get old.
In 2001, H. R. Harmon left his cozy corner office and became the U.S. ambassador to China. In 2003, while he was in Beijing, his wife, Patricia—Evan’s mother—died. She succumbed to a several-year battle with cancer at a Boston hospital. H. R. had not seen her in four months. He returned to Boston for the funeral, stayed three days, went back to China.
Herbert Harmon stayed in his ambassadorial position until mid-2005, when he suffered a minor heart attack. And thus ended his political career and globe-trotting ways. Since the attack, he’d been based in New York City and been a consultant for his son’s hedge fund company, Ascension. His name stopped appearing in the papers on a regular basis. His face stopped showing up on television interviews. The only thing he seemed to do consistently was play golf. Every afternoon, weather permitting, at his Westchester country club, he teed off at 4 p.m. The time rarely varied because he was both punctual and a creature of habit and because the course was empty then. Sometimes he would take a business associate, sometimes a friend. But mostly he went by himself. H. R. Harmon didn’t like to play with friends. He liked to play alone, with just a caddy. It’s easier to cheat, Justin thought, if the only person watching you is someone you’re paying to walk along beside you.
And that, Justin decided, was all he was going to learn that morning. He didn’t know exactly where he was headed, but he had some names and places with which to start. And he had a few patterns. They were vague and tenuous at best, but they were there. Now he just had to figure out what they meant.
At 6:30 a.m., Justin Westwood left his computer and stretched out on the living room couch. At 6:35 he was sound asleep. He stayed asleep for all of twenty-five minutes. As tired as he was, he couldn’t ignore the urgent ringing of his telephone. And at 7 a.m., when he stumbled back toward the small table that served as his desk and spoke to the person on the other end of the line, he wasn’t tired anymore. He was, in fact, as wide awake as he could be.
6
Li Ling waited in the shadows without moving.
It was not difficult for her to wait. She had long ago been trained to view time as something that could be mastered. That was unimportant. Time was something that, for her, did not really exist except as a way to put chains around anyone weak enough to bend to its will.
It was also easy for her to stay completely still. The positio
n was called Silent Oak. They had taught it to her when she was three years old. It had been torture to remain so unbending at such a young age. Her tiny body had wanted to wiggle and squirm and run free. But with every little spasm, every minute tic, came punishment. By the age of five, she could remain perfectly rigid for four hours at a time. At seven, she knew she could stand without moving all day and night if need be. When she reached the age of ten there was no longer even a thought of movement or of freedom. Restriction was freedom by then. Freedom from her body. For with her training came the knowledge that the body was merely a tool of the brain. It was there to do what it was told. By itself it could feel nothing: no pleasure, no discomfort, no pain. It felt only what she decided it would feel.
She had worked with her master before she could even walk. He taught her many variations of the martial arts, always making sure she understood that it was indeed art she was learning to create. The art of movement. The art of power. The art of violence. The ultimate art of both life and death.
The discipline she gravitated toward was shin yi, for she loved its short, precise moves. There was no waste of motion or energy and no room for error. Much of its art was in knowing when not to move. It reinforced what she had, nearly from the beginning of her life, instinctively understood: in stillness there was also beauty. And it was beauty, above all, that she learned to crave. Beauty in any form. Beauty that could match her own.
She had known that her appearance was not ordinary from the time she was able to stand so silent and unmoving. She saw the looks in men’s eyes when they stared at her. In women’s eyes, too. The eyes of others revealed all: desire, envy, submission, rage. She saw all that when people looked at her. She saw it and she began to crave it the way she did beauty. She wanted all of it.
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