by Tami Hoag
The panic seized her again. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God!”
Then, like a marionette, she was plucked off her feet. Her kidnapper crushed a forearm across her rib cage, trapping her against his body. The tip of a knife blade caught hold of the bag, pierced it, nicked her cheek, and split the cloth open on the right side.
The harsh glare of headlights was blinding. Then he swung her around so she could see where that light fell—on a section of paved road that ended with a striped road-block sign; on the bank of a marsh; on three alligators spread over that terrain, two on the bank and one on the road, hissing at the car. Empty ham cans littered the bank, and Lisbeth remembered the loud splashing sound she had heard while she was lying in the trunk. Bait.
Her attacker grabbed a handful of the sack and her hair and pulled her head back as he started moving toward the alligator on the road. Lisbeth began to struggle, frantic to get free of him. He pulled harder on her hair and kept advancing on the reptile.
“No! No! No! No!” she screamed.
The alligator opened its jaws and hissed.
Her captor stopped within ten feet of it and spoke for the very first time, whispering into her ear, “This is what happens to girls who talk too much.”
Chapter 36
“Do you know why you’re in here?”
Landry didn’t bite.
Weiss smirked. “Are we getting a commendation?”
Lt. William Dugan stared at him. Tall, tan, gray-haired, he cut a figure of authority. The boss of Robbery/Homicide stood behind his desk with his hands jammed at his waist, his shoulders set.
Weiss glanced at Landry. “I guess not.”
“So far this morning,” Dugan went on, “I’ve had the sheriff and half the politicos of Palm Beach County crawling up my ass. Plus the state’s attorney and half a dozen designer-suit defense attorneys, not the least of which are Bert Shapiro and Edward Estes.”
“Estes?” Weiss cocked a brow at Landry.
“Shut up, Weiss,” Landry growled.
“What the hell are you doing out there?” Dugan asked. “Why are you messing around with these people?”
“They’re suspects,” Landry said. “What are we supposed to do? Send them engraved invitations to come down here and talk to us?
Maybe we could make finger sandwiches and have tea. Maybe if we ask pretty please one of them will make a confession.“
“I’ll tell you what you can’t do,” Dugan said. “You can’t barge into a private club and demand these people give you DNA samples. What the hell were you thinking?”
“Demand?” Landry asked. He glanced at Weiss. “Did you demand anything from those pricks last night?”
“Not me. Did you?”
Landry looked at his lieutenant. “Stop beating around the fucking bush. Who exactly are we talking about here? Bennett Walker?”
“Among others.”
“‘Cause I’ll tell you right now, he’s a punk,” Landry said. “He’s a spoiled rich-boy prick, who thinks he can do any goddamn thing he wants to, including beating and raping women.”
“He walked on those charges,” Dugan said.
Landry rolled his eyes. “Oh, well, he must be innocent, then, ”cause Christ knows the justice system never fucks up.“
“Can the sarcasm,” Dugan snapped.
“This is bullshit,” Landry said. “You’re going to tell us to tiptoe around these assholes because they have money to buy big-prick lawyers? That’s bullshit.”
“Do you know what those big-prick lawyers can do to your case?” Dugan asked. “If Bennett Walker had given you a DNA sample last night and it matched DNA in the victim, you could kiss that evidence good-bye. Edward Estes is going to get that thrown out of court so fast it’ll give you whiplash.”
“Well, what do you want us to do?” Weiss asked. “Call central casting and ask for a fresh crop of suspects? Maybe some drug dealers?”
“Are you looking beyond these men?”
“I followed up on a lead on a guy named Brad Garland,” Weiss said. “He saw the vie that night, she rejected him, he was pissed off.”
“And?”
“And he wrapped his car around a light pole on his way from one club to another. He was in the ER for eight hours and admitted for observation with a head injury.”
“Irina Markova spent the last hours anyone admits to seeing her with Jim Brody and Bennett Walker and that pack of dogs,” Landry said. “It’s a waste of time to look elsewhere. You want to make it look like we’re going through those motions, assign someone else to do that. We’ve got real leads.”
Dugan frowned. “You’re serious about Walker?”
“Dead,” Landry said. “In private these guys call themselves the Alibi Club. They think they can get away with anything.”
“Murder is a stretch,” Dugan said.
“Why? A sociopath is a sociopath. It doesn’t matter how big his bank account is.”
“And they all cover for a killer?”
Landry shrugged. “Maybe they all had a hand in it. We know she had oral sex with multiple partners. Maybe that’s why no one rats out anyone—because they’re all guilty.”
“Jesus,” Dugan muttered. “This is going to be a media freak show. Just the idea something like that could be going on…”
He turned and looked out his window, as if expecting to see reporters and news vans crowding the parking lot.
“Nobody hears it from you,” he ordered. “One thing leaks from this office, you’re both out. You’ll be working security at Wal-Mart.”
“My dream job,” Weiss cracked.
“I’m serious. Not one word. Have you talked about this Alibi Club with anyone else? Where did you hear it?”
“Lisbeth Perkins,” Landry said, resurrecting the lie he’d told Weiss the night before. “She’s a groom at Brody’s place—and one of the sweet young things running with that crowd. She was best friends with the dead girl. I doubt she’s the only one who knows about it. Gossip is a full-contact sport with the money crowd. It’s only a matter of time before that shit hits the fan.”
“So far you can’t put the dead girl with any of these guys once they left Players?”
Landry shook his head. “I went to talk to one of the valets last night, but the kid split before I got there. Maybe he can put her in a car with somebody. Weiss is tracking him down today.”
“This is going to be one hell of a shitstorm,” Dugan said.
Weiss’s cell phone rang. Dugan waved him out of the office.
Landry turned to go.
“Tell me about Alexi Kulak being here last night.”
Landry shrugged. “There’s nothing to tell. Irina Markova was his niece, or so he says. He came to see the body, find out about making arrangements.”
“In the dead of night?”
“If you were Alexi Kulak, would you come strolling into the sheriff’s office at high noon?”
“Is he a suspect?” Dugan asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Alexi Kulak has someone clipped, he goes out for borscht or whatever the hell Russians eat,” Landry said. “He doesn’t go see them in the morgue. He doesn’t fall down on his knees, break down sobbing, and vow revenge.”
“Weiss told me Elena Estes found the girl’s body.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So you neglected to mention that to me.”
“It’s in my report.”
“Which I have yet to see.”
“I’ve been a little busy,” Landry snapped. “Besides, it’s not relevant,” he said. “She was minding her own business and she happened to find a corpse.”
“And the vie worked where she lives,” Dugan pressed.
“You want me to pin it on her?” Landry cracked. “That’d make some juicy tabloid headlines. We could make it out to be a lesbian thing. Or we could spin it that she killed the girl to frame her ex-fiance, to make him pay for the rape he got away with back when. And then her f
ather represents the asshole in the trial again. All we need is Bat Boy and a nine-hundred-sixteen-pound man and we’ve got a complete edition of the Weekly World News.”
Dugan rubbed his hands over his face and groaned. “That’s right. Elena Estes is Edward Estes’s daughter.”
“Yep.”
“I need some Advil.”
“You might as well drink,” Landry suggested, as his cell phone began to ring.
“Is she digging around in this case?” Dugan asked. “I can’t have that. Especially because of her father. There’s no way it doesn’t bite his in the ass one way or another.”
He checked the caller ID. Elena.
“I recommend vodka,” Landry said, backing out the door. “It goes with everything.”
Chapter 37
“Landry.”
He picked up on the third ring. I had been hoping for voice mail.
“If that party moved from Players to Walker’s house, every car that went there is on tape in the guard shacks at the entrances to the Polo Club,” I said without preamble. I was beyond social niceties.
“But we don’t know where the party moved,” Landry said. “Polo Club management is making right-to-privacy noises. They aren’t cooperating without a warrant.”
“Damn.”
“We’re working on it,” he said. “We’ll get it. I’m sorry about last night.”
It took me half a minute to digest that.
“I was way out of line,” he said. “It doesn’t matter why.”
“No,” I said quietly. “It doesn’t.”
I hung up. Not out of anger, but because there was no point in continuing the conversation. He didn’t try to call me back.
I drove out to Star Polo, to the barns, in search of Lisbeth.
“She’s not working,” one of the hands told me in Spanish. “No one has seen her today.”
“She went someplace?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Is her car gone?”
“No. Her car is here.” He pointed out the end of the barn to a sporty little red Saturn convertible.
I thanked him and went to have a look at the car. Where would she have gone without a car? It was a fair hike back into town. I doubted anyone would choose to walk it.
Did she have a hot date the night before? We she sleeping in with Bennett or one of his pals? I doubted it. Lisbeth was in over her head with these people, and she knew it. With Irina gone, I suspected she didn’t know what to do, how to get out of being one of the girls with this crowd. She was probably scared. And rightly so. Her best friend had been murdered.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d quit her job. And like any horse person in Wellington during the season, immediately I wondered if I could poach her to take Irina’s spot at Sean’s. That would endear me to Jim Brody.
“Elena!”
And there he was in a blue button-down shirt and riding breeches, his belly spilling over at the belt.
“Good morning—I hope,” I said, feigning apprehension. “I was coming to look for you.”
“Well, here I am,” he said, jovial as ever.
I walked away from Lisbeth’s car to where he stood on the drive. “I want to apologize for last night,” I said.
“There’s nothing for you to apologize for,” he said. “Ben was out of line.”
“Nevertheless—”
“I didn’t know him back then,” he said. “But I’ve known him for quite a few years. He can be a real prick, but under that he’s a decent guy.”
A decent guy who openly cheated on his mentally unstable wife with girls half his age. Someone had apparently lowered the bar on decency since I last checked.
“We just shouldn’t be allowed within twenty feet of each other,” I said. “There’s too much history.”
“Well, that shouldn’t preclude the rest of us from enjoying your company,” he said. “You don’t really think he had anything to do with Irina’s murder, do you? I can tell you he was quite fond of the girl.”
“Fond?” That came out exactly how it shouldn’t have.
Brody didn’t take offense. In fact, he chuckled. “Maybe that’s not quite the right word. Irina liked to have a good time. She was strong, knew what she wanted. She would have made something of herself. She was hungry.”
“That’s not always a good thing,” I said, thinking of the bill from the Lundeen Clinic and what that might have been about. “I guess it all depends on what one wants. Maybe Irina wanted too much.”
His brows lowered ever so slightly. “There’s no such thing,” he said. “You know what they say: Nothing succeeds like excess.
“Who did say that?” he asked. A twitch of a brow, a twinkle in the eye. He was trying to move me off topic.
“Oscar Wilde,” I said. “It didn’t work out so well for him. He died destitute in a rented room.”
“Well…” He frowned. Tough to find a snappy comeback for that.
“Live ‘til you die, that’s what I say,” I said, forcing the happiness aura. “Grab the gusto and all that.”
“I’m all for that,” Brody agreed. “That’s what we all should do. That’s what we can learn from this tragedy.”
“I would rather learn who killed her first and hope I have the luxury of time to reflect on the moral to the story later,” I said.
He didn’t like that. Life would have been so much easier for him if he could have distracted me with a shiny piece of jewelry or a trip to Bermuda. That’s the trouble with women: We’re so less easy to impress once we’re past the age of blushing and giggling.
“I can’t help you there,” he said, quickly losing all patience with me. “In fact, I’ve been advised not to talk about the girl at all.”
“Advised? By whom?”
“My attorney,” he said, looking me square in the eye. “Your father.”
That news should have come as no surprise, yet it still delivered an unwelcome kick. My father had just come one step closer into my life.
“Well,” I said, “you’re paying dearly for that advice. You’d better follow it.”
“I have a feeling you never did,” he said.
“No,” I said. And I paid dearly too. “But then, no one ever looked at me as a possible murder suspect.”
“I’m heading that off at the pass,” he said. “The best defense is a good offense. I didn’t have anything to do with that girl’s death, and I’m not allowing anyone to make it seem as if I did.”
I wondered what had happened to precipitate that move. Had Landry or Weiss pushed that button? Had the media?
The news hounds would be catching up to speed soon. I was surprised it hadn’t happened already. The instant they got wind of the men last seen with Irina, they would be rabid, particularly when Bennett Walker’s name surfaced. I knew for a fact that would be happening even while I stood there in the driveway of Star Polo with Jim Brody.
I knew because I had made the phone calls myself.
It’s never too late to be bitter or vindictive.
“Was there anything else I can help you with?” Brody asked. “I don’t mean to give you the bum’s rush, Elena, but I’m due to be somewhere.”
“No, no,” I said, glancing back at Lisbeth’s car.
“I brought some things for Lisbeth,” I said, lifting my purse for him to notice. “Some photographs I thought she might like to have from Irina. I know they were close.”
“Haven’t seen her,” he said, looking around. Pretending to look for her, I thought. “I don’t think she’s here.”
“Don’t you find that strange?” I asked. “Her car is here.”
“She probably went somewhere with a friend,” he said, and started moving away from me.
“You’re probably right.”
I thanked him for his time and went to my car. He climbed into his Escalade. I followed him out the driveway. He turned left, I turned right. When I had gone a mile or so, I turned my car around and went back.
I went inside the barn, found the same hand I had spoken with earlier, and told him I had something to give Lisbeth and wanted to leave it outside her door. Did he know where she lived?
Oh, yes, she lived upstairs, over the stable. Go out of the barn and take the stairs on the left. He would show me. I told him that wasn’t necessary and thanked him.