Jack couldn’t believe she was confessing this to him. “You killed Anne Ryan?” he said.
Elizabeth smiled. “You’re a sharp man, Mr. Douglas. Brighter than I imagined. Yes, I killed her. I was desperate and so I killed her. It was the best and worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. While I may have gotten Anne Ryan out of our lives, my daughter is now dead because of what I did, and now my husband and my other daughter are at risk.”
Jack stood there, dumbstruck. “You could have stopped this.”
If she heard him, it wasn’t apparent.
“I’ve never told George,” Elizabeth said. “But I think he’s always known. He’s just never had the heart to ask.” She looked at Jack. “But you’ll change all that, won’t you, Mr. Douglas? You’ll tell George. And you’ll tell the police.”
“I have no choice.”
“Of course you don’t,” she said. “You’re an honest man.”
It was getting late. He had to meet Greenfield at the hotel before he and his men went inside. He was walking past Elizabeth when she said, “I love my family, Mr. Douglas. I’ve told you this for their benefit, not mine. I understand the repercussions—I’ll go to prison. But the trade-off is worth it if you get there in time and don’t let Louis Ryan hurt either of them.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
“Have I ever told you that you remind me of my wife?”
They were standing in one of the exterior glass elevators. Beyond the tinted windows that overlooked Manhattan’s Upper East Side, glittering Fifth Avenue skyscrapers rushed past them. Leana looked at Louis, who seemed to be leaning against the city, his hands resting along the chrome rail, a faintly nostalgic look on his face. While the subject had never been discussed between them, Leana knew that he once accused her father of murdering Anne Ryan.
She didn’t know why he mentioned this and she certainly wasn’t about to ask—Leana had other things on her mind. She looked up at the elevator’s lighted dial and said, “We’re almost there, Louis.”
But Louis ignored her dismissive tone. “I think Anne would have enjoyed tonight,” he said. “She always liked parties. She was the perfect hostess—beautiful, smart, witty, sophisticated. Anne could make friends as easily as I seem to make enemies.” He smiled at the memory of her. “If she were alive today, you can bet your ass that the Baron and Baroness would have invited us to one of their dinner parties. They would have fallen in love with her just as I did. Everyone liked her.”
Leana knew that she should respond to this, but she didn’t want to encourage him. The man who murdered her sister was in her office. It was this she wanted to focus on, not Louis Ryan’s wife. Willing the elevator to move faster, she said, “She sounds wonderful, Louis. You must miss her very much.”
“Oh, I do,” Louis said. “We were perfect together, Leana. You can’t imagine how much I miss her.”
He looked away and she saw something in his expression change, as if a switch had been shut off, a curtain dropped. “I suppose that’s why your father murdered her.”
He leaned forward and pressed the button that stopped the elevator. Beyond the windows, the city froze.
Fear crept into Leana’s heart.
“She died thirty-one years ago,” Louis said, his finger still on the button. “Victim of a freak car accident.” He cocked an eyebrow at her. “At least that’s what the police said. But I know differently. I’ve always known differently. Your father murdered my wife. Have I ever told you what happened, Leana?”
She didn’t answer him. She checked the dial and saw that they were between the twentieth and twenty-first floors.
“I see that I haven’t. But I do think you should know what your father did. I think it’s time that you and the whole world knew exactly what happened.”
Leana’s heart was beating in her throat. She remembered how strangely he acted on the dance floor, how preoccupied he had been with her father and she had a sudden premonition of danger.
“The weather was terrible that night,” Louis said. “Anne and I had an argument and she left the house in the middle of a blizzard. I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t listen to me. Instead, she got into her car and left. I couldn’t go after her. We had only one car back then and I remember how worried I was for her. Anne never drove in the snow. Hours passed and nothing, not a word. So I started calling around to friends, family—but nobody had seen her. Nobody knew where she was.”
He seemed to slip further into the past, sinking straight into a time and a place in which she sensed he wasn’t comfortable. He closed his eyes. “And then the police called,” he said. “They told me that Anne’s car went off the road and over the bridge that was down the road from our house.”
He removed his finger from the glowing button and the elevator lurched into motion. Leana watched him pull his hand away. All of this was a set-up. She’d played right into it. She looked at the elevator doors and wondered what would be beyond them when they opened.
“It was awful,” Louis said. “Leaving the house, running through the snow to the bridge, seeing her car like that in the river, knowing there was no way she could have survived that fall, knowing that my Anne was dead.” Anger shot into his voice. “Do you know what that did to me? Do you know how long I’ve waited for this moment?”
What moment?
Leana pressed her back against the elevator doors. Somewhere, far in the dark corners of her mind, she knew where this was leading, knew what he was saying, but she refused to believe it, because it couldn’t be true.
Louis closed the distance between them, the rage suddenly there on his face, heated and alive. It was as dark as her fear, as black as her dress and it filled the elevator to capacity. In a low voice, he said, “Even before I learned her tires were flattened by a shotgun, I knew this was no accident. Your father and I had been battling in court for years. When I won that final appeal, he got his revenge two days later by killing one of the few people who ever mattered to me.” His eyes became hard stones of hate. “And now I’m taking everything away from him.”
She shrank away from him, her eyes growing wide with disbelief. She felt her knees start to give as realization washed over her. Her world began to blur as all of the pieces of the past several weeks clicked into place. “You!” she gasped.
Louis reached out and grabbed her by the arm. “That’s right,” he said. “Me.”
The elevator stopped.
The shiny chrome doors slid open, revealing a long, elegantly appointed corridor that stretched before them in varying degrees of light and darkness.
Leana’s office was at the end of the hall. Louis pushed her so hard through the doors that she hit the wall opposite the elevator. A table was there. She reached out to grasp it in an effort to stop the momentum, but she missed. She fell on the table and went down with it.
“Get up.”
But the table wasn’t bare. On it was a lamp, which now was at her side. Leana clutched it and turned to throw it at him, but Louis was there. He grabbed the lamp as she swung it at his face and flung it across the room, where it smashed on the floor.
“You’ll need to be quicker than that,” he said. “Get up.”
She did what she was told. He took her by the arm and they started walking toward her office, their footsteps echoing like drum taps on the polished marble floor.
Leana was numb. Louis Ryan’s words beat in her head. He killed her sister. It was him all along. “You won’t get away with this,” she said. “Everyone knows I’m here.”
“That’s right,” Louis said. “Everyone knows you’re here. But what you’re forgetting is this, Leana. Everybody also knows what happened to your sister. The whole world knows that somebody is out to harm your family. If you’re found shot dead tonight, no one’s going to be surprised by it.” He thought of the two barmen that had been found in the lobby. “Security already has been breached.”
Leana looked furiously at him. “You planted those men at the bar.”
“Actually, I didn’t,” he said. “I don’t know who they are or why they were here. But I am glad they came. Their presence just made things a lot easier for me.”
They were nearing the end of the hall. Leana could faintly hear voices coming from her office. She turned and looked back down the length of the corridor, toward the elevator. She had to escape. She had to get help. But how? She could feel Louis looking at her.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “And I have to tell you that you’d be wasting your time. This entire floor has been sealed off. Every door is locked, every exit is barred. Your only way out is through that elevator and in a moment, Vincent Spocatti is going to take care of that. You run and I promise you’ll get shot in the back.”
They were at her office. He opened the door and said, “By the way—your husband’s last name isn’t Archer. That’s just a pen name he used to escape from me. His legal name is Michael Ryan.”
Leana looked at him in disgust. “Bullshit,” she said.
“Hardly.” He pushed the door open and they came face to face with her father and Michael.
Time and space drew in on themselves.
They were seated across the room in matching red velvet chairs. The city blazed behind them. Pale as ghosts, they looked up at her when she walked inside. Seeing them here, realizing just how carefully Louis Ryan had orchestrated this, Leana could no longer still the panic rising up in her. He’s going to kill us.
“Stand up, Michael,” Louis said.
Michael did as he was told.
“Michael isn’t my son, Leana,” Louis said in an oddly detached voice. “There was a time when I thought he was, a time when he meant the world to me, but when I found Anne’s journal and read that final entry, I knew what George Redman did to her. I knew how he manipulated my wife.”
He looked across the room at George, who was unmoving. “Michael’s not my son,” he said. “He’s your father’s son. You married your brother.”
* * *
Forty floors below, The Hotel Fifth was quietly being surrounded by members of the New York City Police Department, while inside, a special task force led by Lieutenant Vic Greenfield was rapidly combing each room on each floor.
Jack Douglas already had been debriefed by Greenfield, but for security reasons, he wasn’t allowed inside the building. He stood across the street on the sidewalk, watching yet another trio of police cars turn onto 53rd Street and drive without lights to the hotel’s east entrance.
All eighteen hundred guests had been evacuated. Crowds of people were along the sidewalks. The press was there, recording it for the world. Jack heard a faint chopping sound and turned to see a sleek police helicopter moving up Fifth Avenue, toward the swirling lights of The Hotel Fifth.
He felt his stomach tense and his head pound in time with the rapid beating of his heart. It was happening, he thought, but was it happening fast enough?
* * *
In Leana’s office, the silence expanded like a balloon.
Spocatti stood at the rear of the room, watching the color drain from Leana Redman’s face. George Redman didn’t deny Ryan’s claim. Neither did Michael. Spocatti watched her lips part and felt a kind of thrill.
George stepped forward. Spocatti gripped his gun and longed to use it.
“This is between you and me, Louis. Nobody else. Why don’t you be a man and let them go?”
Louis pushed Leana forward. He shut the door behind them and started moving across the room, toward Spocatti. “Be a man?” he said. “Is that what you were when you fucked my wife? Is that what you were when you got her pregnant? Were you a man when you loaded that shotgun and killed her?”
“I never touched your wife.”
Incredulous, Louis stopped mid-stride. “Never touched her?” He shoved a finger at Michael. “Then explain him. Explain your goddamn son. You read the portion of Anne’s journal I sent to you. In her own words, she wrote about how you got her pregnant only weeks after I terminated our partnership and bought Pine Gardens on my own.” He looked at Leana. “He was fucking her while he was engaged to your mother.”
Spocatti glanced at his watch. He wanted to be out of there in five. He looked across the room at Amparo Gragera, who was standing beneath one of the illumined Sisley paintings, watching it all go down with interest. He told her to take care of the elevator. He waited for her to leave the room before coming around Leana Redman’s desk and moving in front of the windows that overlooked 53rd Street.
He gazed across to the neighboring building he’d visited with the Realtor earlier that day, raised a hand and then looked down at his chest as a swarm of tiny pinpoints of red light spiraled over his heart.
He nodded at men he couldn’t see and the red lasers winked off.
Spocatti knew the risks he’d taken by meeting here tonight. He knew the hotel was crawling with security. But he also never finished any deal without having secured a safety net. The one he had tonight was airtight.
He turned away from the window and waited for someone to speak. If things didn’t happen soon, he would take matters into his own hands.
“So, this is it, Ryan?” George said. “You’re going to kill us with a lobby full of people? Is that the plan?”
Louis shot him a fierce, warning look. He went to Leana’s desk, opened a side drawer and removed the gun he placed there earlier. He pointed it at George. “Yes,” he said. “That’s the plan.”
“And what do you suppose that will solve?”
“Everything,” Louis said. “You ruined my life. You murdered Anne. Did you really think I’d let you get away with it forever? I’ve waited years for this.”
“Anne’s death was an accident,” George said levelly. “You know that as well as I do. I did nothing to Anne. I loved her more than you ever did. Your problem is that you’ve never been able to accept the fact that Anne fell out of love with you and in love with me.”
The words were like a blow to Louis. For an instant, the gun wavered in his hand.
“If you want someone to pay, then I suggest you shoot me and let Leana and Michael go,” George said. “This has nothing to do with them. This is between you and me.”
Louis moved to speak, but then turned and pointed the gun at Leana. Alarmed, she took a step back.
“I know you can’t stand your own daugher, George. Still, maybe this will give you an idea of how it feels.” He fired the gun.
The sound echoed hollowly in the room. Thunderstruck, George watched Leana stagger back, her eyes wide with horror and surprise. There was a tiny hole in her dress, just to the left of her navel. Leana looked down at the hole and covered it with her hands as blood leaked between her fingers and spilled onto the floor. She looked at her father, then at Louis and Michael, and crumpled to her knees. A rush of air escaped her lips.
Michael ran to her side. He knelt beside her, put his hands around her waist and applied pressure to the wound.
Outside, in the hall, Amparo Gragera was suddenly shouting. There was a rapid exchange of gunfire and she screamed.
Spocatti removed his gun and hurried across the office. He closed the office door, locked it and became aware that his cell phone was ringing. He snatched it from his belt, listened to the frenetic shouting on the other end and turned in disbelief to the windows. For a moment, he saw nothing. Then the police helicopter descended into sight, its blinding spotlights flooding the office.
Spocatti looked into the light and for a moment, he couldn’t see. “Why didn’t you warn me?” he said over the phone.
The machine was hovering just beyond the office windows. Furious, Louis turned to look at Spocatti, but instead came face to face with George Redman as he lunged for the gun in Louis’ hands. George tried to wrench it free, but couldn’t. And so he tackled Louis so hard, the gun slipped from the man’s hands and spun across the floor. With everything he had in him, George kept moving, kept pushing Ryan back until he was mashed against the great panes of glass.
&n
bsp; The police were pounding on the office door.
Nerves wired, heart pounding, Spocatti backed away from it. He looked briefly at Leana and Michael, then across the room at George and Louis, who were struggling against the glass, the gun somewhere between them.
He had an impulse to shoot them both, to finish this once and for all, but there was no time. He darted to an area of the office where there were no windows and ripped the cover off a heating duct. He threw it aside just as Ryan’s gun rang out.
Spocatti watched George Redman slump to the carpet, his face caught for an instant in the brilliant glare of the helicopter’s spotlight. Louis shot him in the chest. George fell on his side and lay there, his eyes opened and unseeing.
Ryan pointed the gun at the man’s head. He said something Spocatti didn’t hear and was about to fire when the office door crashed open and the police burst into the room. Their guns were drawn.
“Put the gun down!”
In that split second, Louis made his decision. He fired the gun—and saw the bullet go into the floor beside George Redman’s head. He missed! Missed!
He was about to shoot again when the police peppered his stomach and chest with a flurry of bullets.
Louis’ mouth gaped open.
The gun jerked from his hand and fell to the floor.
He took another bullet in the chest and stumbled back against the trembling windows—just beyond them the helicopter roared. One of its doors was open and two men with sniper rifles were tethered to a rail and leaning out. Their guns were pointed at Louis. As he turned to them, they let loose a hail of bullets, which splintered the glass and sent Louis stumbling backward. Spocatti felt nothing. How many times had he asked Louis to keep the blinds closed?
The Fifth Avenue Series Boxed Set Page 43