Hades

by Russell Andrews

  Third on his list to explore: Rockworth and Williams. The firm was the single element in this entire mix that appeared repeatedly and had tentacles that reached out to all parties. Justin had learned an important lesson as a homicide investigator: People killed for love or money. It’s what everything boiled down to. In this case, Rockworth and Williams seemed to be the source of—or at least the common link to—all the people who were involved. Evan Harmon had worked there. His father had worked there. Evan’s company, Ascension, used Rockworth as its primary broker for its hedge fund investments. Forrest Bannister, Ascension’s CFO and the man who found Evan’s body, had connections to Rockworth. Ellis St. John was R&W’s link to Ascension, and he had disappeared.

  Justin had to get inside Rockworth and Williams. Had to talk to H. R. Harmon and Lincoln Berdon. Most of all, he knew he had to find Ellis St. John. Right now, St. John’s disappearance made him the prime suspect in Evan Harmon’s murder and possibly the other two as well. But Justin knew the fact that he was gone had other ramifications, too. St. John might have fled because he was afraid. Or he, too, might have suffered the same fate as his two fellow Wall Streeters. Justin understood that if he did find Ellis St. John, he might not find him alive. Right now, though, he had to work as if the R&W employee was on the lam. And involved in the murders.

  Then there were the two official suspects. Justin knew he couldn’t overlook them. He did not believe in Larry Silverbush’s solution to the crime: that Abby and Dave Kelley had committed a crime of passion. Or even one of convenience. Right after Evan’s body had been discovered, it had been a plausible theory. But now it was too myopic a view. The case had expanded, gotten more complicated. There were too many other angles that had overtaken the DA’s quick fix. And too many other deaths. Right now, Justin had one big advantage over Silverbush and his investigative crew: It was unlikely that they had any suspicion that the two murders in Rhode Island were connected to Evan Harmon’s slaying. That probability made all the difference in the world. Nonetheless, Justin knew that he couldn’t dismiss Abby’s and Kelley’s involvement. Just because things had gotten more complicated didn’t mean that they weren’t involved at some level. He didn’t believe that they were, but he couldn’t ignore the possibility. He couldn’t afford to ignore anything right now.

  Justin also knew he had to talk to Bruno. He was still waiting for Billy DiPezio to send him the results of the fingerprint search he’d asked for—a search that would, Justin hoped, identify the man who’d tried to shoot Bruno. The big man was another piece to this strange puzzle, and Justin had to find out where that piece fit. Bruno had said he’d appear once Justin was back in East End Harbor, and Justin knew that Bruno was, in his own way, a man of his word. So he could wait for Bruno to keep his word. At least for a little while.

  And finally, he had to find the meaning of Wanda’s message to him.

  Just for the hell of it, he had googled the words that Wanda had managed to scrawl on her body: “Hades” and “Ali.”

  Hades had 9,850,000 mentions on the main page. There were 176,000 different references to the use of the word “Hades” in song lyrics; there was a Hades computer software program; paintings of the god Hades in museums all over the world; poems and books about Hades dating back hundreds of years; food products named Hades and a Hades Bloody Mary mix. It was impossible even to begin to sift through the various choices. The only thing he knew about Hades was the mythological aspect: it was the name, in Greek mythology, for both the underworld and the god of the underworld. So what Justin did was to pick the very first and easiest Google reference and enter it into his computer. He didn’t really know why he bothered, except he liked the sound of it, and including it in his file—seeing it whenever he went back in to refer to his notes—would work to keep his anger about Wanda fresh and present and alive. He decided to title the entire casebook document Hades, and he typed in the following from something called the “Hades homework page”: “HADES: Zeus’s brother and ruler of the underworld and the dead. Also called Pluto—God of Wealth.”

  Justin thought it was fitting. The god of wealth and the ruler of the dead. Sounded like a god whose path he might cross one of these days.

  Googling the name “Ali” produced 216,000,000 mentions. He managed to scroll through about forty of them—one-line descriptions of sites for info on Muhammad Ali, Ali G, NASA’s advanced land imager (acronym ALI), Ali Baba, and an actor named Ali Suliman who was in the film Paradise Now (which, oddly enough, Justin had gone to see with Abby Harmon at the old-fashioned, arty East End Harbor movie theater that always smelled of grape drink and disinfectant). Justin gave up fairly quickly on this second search, deciding it was a reasonably safe bet that neither Muhammad Ali nor Ali G had anything to do with his murder investigations. He found absolutely nothing there he deemed worth adding to his lists.

  Restless, he reached for his cell phone and dialed Abby’s number in the city. She had not returned his calls from yesterday. He got her answering machine again, left a briefer message than his last one. “It’s Jay. I’m in East End and I’d like to talk to you.” She knew his number, so he didn’t bother leaving it. The fact that he even considered leaving it made him realize that the relationship had shifted and was already different. So after a very brief pause, all he said was, “So call me. Bye.” He then called her cell, which also immediately went to voice mail. He repeated, almost word for word, what he’d left on her home machine. Then he hung up, dissatisfied.

  He paced around the room, not exactly sure what was fueling his impatience. At 7:30 p.m. Justin forced himself to sit back down at the computer. He made a short To Do list: an abbreviated version of everything he’d already entered, now turning them into specific tasks, in order of priority. This final list read:

  1. Evan Harmon—background; Fed investigation

  2. Ronald LaSalle—business connections to Harmon

  3. Hades

  4. Ali

  5. Rockworth and Williams—Ellis St. John, H. R. Harmon, Lincoln Berdon

  6. Billy DiPezio—print results

  7. Dave Kelley

  8. Abby

  9. Bruno

  There was nothing more he could realistically get done tonight except perhaps for some more reading, so he began to think about dinner. He had nothing in his fridge or freezer—and the lack of anything even remotely domestic in his house made him think about the differences in the life he led from the one led by his parents. Right about now Louise would be setting a delicious meal and an excellent wine on the table before Jonathan and Lizbeth. No one was going to serve Justin the bottle of Pete’s Wicked Ale and the shitty Chinese food he was about to go out and get and eat straight out of the cardboard carton.

  Choices, he thought. Everything was about choices.

  He’d made his. Maybe he should have made some different ones along the way.

  Maybe it wasn’t too late to make different choices for the future.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t about choices. Maybe it was about fate. Or randomness. Maybe it was just about doing the best you could to control the uncontrollable.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on his front door. Three knocks. Two were rather soft and tentative. The last one was harder, more forceful, as if whoever it was wasn’t really sure about wanting to come in, then gathered up some courage and decided it was okay after all. Justin didn’t know who could be showing up unexpectedly. He was not exactly Mr. Sociable. He supposed there were several people who wouldn’t mind talking to him at the moment. Larry Silverbush. Leona Krill. Maybe even Bruno. So he rose from his chair—not without some effort; another reminder that he’d better get to the gym sooner rather than later—and went to open the door.

  If there was one person he was not expecting to see—now or ever again—it was the woman standing in his doorway.

  “Are you going to invite me in?” the woman said.

  Justin didn’t answer. He just stared. At first it was a stare of surprise
. But the longer it went on the harder his eyes turned.

  “You’re going to have to let me in sooner or later,” she said. “After all, we’re partners.”

  Justin’s first words to her in over a year were: “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  And from the look on his face, the stunned silence, she saw that he hadn’t been told, that they’d left all this up to her, so she met his hard stare with a softer one of her own and broke the news to him herself.

  “The FBI,” Reggie Bokkenheuser said. “I’m the agent assigned to work with you.”

  Her hair was blonder now; it had been darker when he’d seen her last. It was more natural this way; seemed to fit her better. She’d let it grow some; it had gotten a little wilder looking. And she’d lost some weight; she looked stronger than she used to look, leaner and more muscular. Her blue eyes were the same, though—clear and lovely, if a bit sad, and her skin was smooth and tan, her neck short and not thin but somehow elegant. Her mouth had the same touch of sadness that her eyes had, but it also had the faint trace of a protective smirk. Her mouth and that smirk gave away the fact that she had a sense of humor. But they also kept the world at a distance. Yes, it was definitely the same woman who’d been planted on Justin in the East End Harbor police department a little over a year ago and whom he’d taken into his confidence and to whom he’d made love and who’d led him into a trap that saw him wind up in Guantanamo’s prison. The same woman who’d shot and killed Ray Lockhardt, the manager of the local airport, under orders from her superior at the FBI. The same woman he’d arrested for that murder.

  And the same woman he realized—looking at her standing on his doorstep, her lips parted slightly, her thin smile hopeful and nervous and, as always, lopsided—could still make his stomach flutter and make his knees buckle ever so slightly.

  Damn her.

  Damn them.

  Damn, damn, damn them all.

  He didn’t let her in. At least not immediately. Justin went into town to get Chinese food and insisted she come with him. He didn’t say it, but he didn’t want Regina Bokkenheuser to stay alone in his house. Even for the twenty minutes it took him to get some fried rice and sesame chicken and cold noodles with sesame sauce. Even if it had taken one minute. He didn’t know what she would do. What she might look for, what she might plant.

  They didn’t say one word while they were in the car or while they waited in the small take-out place for the food to be prepared. He wasn’t ready to speak yet, and she followed his lead. His silence was fueled by anger. Hers was more placid—it was just a reaction to his, and it annoyed him even more that she knew him well enough to wait for his mood to change rather than challenge it.

  When they returned to his house he set the food—dropping it, still in the brown paper bag—on the small dining table that sat in his living room. He went into the kitchen and when he returned with two bottles of beer she had already removed the food cartons from the bag and placed them on the table. He put one beer on the table in front of her.

  “Thanks for remembering,” she said.

  “Fuck you,” Justin said.

  “Well,” Reggie said, “at least we’re talking.”

  He turned and went back into the kitchen, emerging moments later with silverware and two plates. He put the plates on the table and served himself some food. He made no effort to serve Reggie, just pushed the white cartons closer to her.

  They ate slowly and silently. She was halfway through the food on her plate when she looked up and said, “Are you ready yet?”

  “For what?”

  “For a conversation.”

  “No,” he said. Then, putting his fork down, he said, “I thought you were in prison.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “I told you, Jay, or I tried to tell you, you just wanted to see me in jail so bad you wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “You belonged in jail.”

  “I was doing my job.”

  “Nice job. Killing an innocent man.”

  She winced. “Yes. Something I’ll have to live with the rest of my life. And it won’t be easy. But I thought I was doing it for national security reasons. I thought the orders were coming all the way from the White House. I was lied to, and I have to stay awake at night knowing I believed the lies. I was manipulated, and maybe I was stupid, but I did what I was trained to do and what I hope I could do again if I had to for the right reasons.”

  Justin didn’t say anything, even when Reggie said, “You’ve killed people before. People who didn’t deserve to die.” And when he looked up sharply, ready to respond in anger, she said, “You think we don’t know what happened to Lieutenant Colonel Warren Grimble, military intelligence?”

  Justin went silent for a moment. Grimble had been the man in charge of his interrogation at Gitmo. Justin had managed to learn his identity. And then he’d done more than that. He was too weak to act himself, so he hired Bruno to do the job. Lieutenant Warren Grimble had disappeared. Justin knew that the disappearance was permanent. Bruno was good at his job.

  “He was not what I’d call an innocent man,” he said.

  “Maybe. But what he did to you, he was doing because he thought it was the right thing to do, because he was under orders to do it.”

  “No,” Justin said quietly. “There are no orders that would cover what he did to me.”

  “Jay,” Reggie said, just as quietly and just as urgently, “after you arrested me, the FBI got me released from custody almost immediately. It wasn’t even a question. The slate was wiped clean. The fact is, they examined what happened as thoroughly as it was possible to examine a case. I don’t have to tell you what the ramifications were after everything that occurred. They thought I did a good enough job that not only was I exonerated, they assigned me to New York. That’s where I’ve been the last year.”

  “You did a good job,” he said. “I’d never deny that. You did one helluva job.”

  “I saved your life,” she said. “Or are you forgetting that?”

  “I haven’t forgotten anything.”

  “I wanted to come see you,” she told him. “Almost every day for the past year, that’s pretty much all I thought about. But I knew you wouldn’t want to see me or hear anything I had to say.”

  “You’re right on that one.”

  “I asked for this assignment. I want you to know that. When word came down, I asked for it.”

  “And they gave it to you?”

  “Sometimes God works in mysterious ways.”

  “I don’t believe in God.”

  “Neither do I. So I guess it’s the FBI that’s pretty mysterious.” Reggie finished off the bottle of beer in front of her and said, “I wanted this job because I care about you. No matter what you think of what I did or what you think of me, I care about you. And I think I owe you something. I’d like to make it up to you—what I did and what happened.”

  “All of a sudden I’ve got a lot of people trying to make things up to me.”

  “I know. That’s one of the reasons why they agreed to send me here.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “The people I work for aren’t as dumb as you like to think they are. They can be pretty insightful. And pretty manipulative.”

  “I still don’t follow.”

  “They think you’ll trust me.”

  He just laughed. A quick, harsh burst of a laugh.

  “Because of what happened to Wanda. And with us. Because of what happened . . . what’s happened in your past. They think you’ll trust me because you’ll want to trust me. And maybe want to help me and protect me.”

  “Out of guilt?”

  “I said they can be smart and manipulative.”

  “And what do you think, Reggie? Do you think I’m going to go along with this because I feel guilty about other women in my life?”

  She did her best to draw o
n her lopsided smile. “I’m hoping you’ll go along with it because of my natural charm.” And when he said nothing, didn’t change expression, just stared at her with that hard stare of his, she said, “Then how about the fact that I’ve already called Larry Silverbush and told him that you’re working with me and that we expect him to give you his full cooperation?”

  “Full cooperation with someone he’s looking at as part of his murder investigation?”

  “Not anymore. I told him we’ve cleared you of any involvement.”

  “And is that true?”

  “The ‘we’ part probably isn’t. But I’m the agent in charge now, so it’s my call. And I don’t think you’re involved in any way.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think you’d kill anyone or anything because of a woman. Hell, I know you were falling for me just a little bit . . . and you tried to send me to prison.”

  “What is it you don’t think I’m capable of? Falling in love or killing someone out of love?”

  “I don’t know, Jay. I didn’t get to know you well enough to make that call.”

  She closed her eyes once, opened them quickly, did it again. He remembered that she did that—batted her long lashes and widened her already large, round, blue eyes. She thought it made her look irresistible. The thing of it was, it did make her look pretty goddamn irresistible.

  Justin swatted at the plate of food in front of him and sent it flying off the table. When she jumped, he anticipated her move, reached out, and grabbed her by her collar, pulling her closer to him over the table.

  “Reggie, let’s get a few things straight.” His voice was low and ragged. “I don’t trust you. I doubt that I ever will. And I won’t be charmed by you, no matter how many times you blink those blue eyes at me. I don’t feel guilty, and even if I did, it wouldn’t make one fucking bit of difference. And I’m sure as hell not going to sleep with you or fall in love with you, not even a little bit.”