28 Hearts of Sand

by Jane Haddam

  “You can’t be here,” he said, his voice coming out in a whine. “You have no right to enter my house without a warrant. Nothing you find here is going to be of any use to you. You can’t use anything I’ve said. I don’t know why you people keep trying this stuff when you know it will never work. I don’t know why you people haven’t figured out that you have to lose in the end. Evil always loses in the end.”

  It was an odd performance, distant and fluctuating. Gregor thought through his options, and then headed for the door.

  “You’ll probably have a few visitors in the next few days,” he said. “You have to know that.”

  “I’m ready for persecution,” Ray Guy Pearce said, his voice climbing almost to a scream. “I’m ready for persecution. I always have been.”

  3

  Back in the car, having given Juan Valdez the information that he’d like to be taken back to Alwych, Gregor got out his cell phone and started making calls.

  His first was the New York Bureau office, where he was threaded through a dozen offices before he found one that had some direct responsibility for the Waring case. He explained Ray Guy Pearce’s declarations about where Chapin Waring had been for the last thirty years and why she hadn’t been found, and he tried to do it in a way that didn’t make any of the agents over the years sound like rank idiots.

  “Hidden in plain sight is always the best way,” he said, desperately trying to sound nonjudgmental. “He said a dozen blocks. That might have been an estimate. You guys should probably do concentric circles until you find where she was. I didn’t get the name she was using, but there will be somebody who disappeared, and that will probably be the one. I don’t think you’ll get lucky enough to have an actual missing persons report. I doubt if she got close to anybody where she was living. It wouldn’t have been safe. And she wasn’t the kind of person who got close to people anyway.”

  “Yes, Mr. Demarkian,” the agent on the line said. She sounded very young and very frightened. “Of course. We can probably get people out there today. You said she was living as a Muslim?”

  “I said that Ray Guy Pearce reported that she was wearing a hijab when she went out. That doesn’t mean that she was living as a Muslim. And I don’t think it makes sense that she would have been doing that. There weren’t many Muslims in New York thirty years ago. What Muslims there were almost certainly comprised a small community and that community was likely to have been enforcing at least some cultural standards. They would have recognized a stranger as a stranger.”

  “Oh,” the agent said. “Yes, of course.”

  “He says he doesn’t have the money, and he doesn’t think she had it, either,” Gregor said. “But you need to find where she was living and look. God only knows if it would still be there if she did have it, with whatever place she was living in being empty for weeks. You still have to look. But if she really didn’t have it, and he really didn’t have it, then that presents an interesting problem. Give me about a day, and I can get you probable cause for a warrant to search his house,” Gregor said. “But you might want to put details up there to watch him. Whether that’s going to be any good or not if he’s got the money in the house, I don’t know.”

  “Details,” the agent said. “I’ll get right on this. Does Mr. Fitzgerald have a number where he can call you?”

  “He’s got my cell number, yes,” Gregor said. “Have him call me. It would help.”

  The agent fluttered and apologized and thanked until Gregor’s eardrums felt as if they had been coated in goo. He hung up and called the Alwych Police Department.

  Jason Battlesea was in his office, and apparently busy.

  “What I need you to do,” Gregor said, “is to make sure your people get all the fingerprints, every single one, in the Waring house. Send somebody back out there and go over the place with tweezers and microscopes. Get fibers. Get prints. Get anything and everything, even if it looks utterly irrelevant. Then I need you to find any DNA you can get off those, and any fingerprints, through every database in existence.”

  “We got everything,” Jason Battlesea said.

  “I don’t mean at the crime scene, and I don’t mean around the door where somebody got in,” Gregor said. “I mean the whole house, upstairs and down. The attic. The basement. Every single inch of flooring and carpet and furniture. Everything.”

  “My God,” Jason Battlesea said. “That will take months. And what for? We looked through the house both times. Nothing had been disturbed—”

  “Nothing had been noticeably disturbed,” Gregor said. “And it shouldn’t take more than twenty-four to forty-eight hours if you put everybody you’ve got on it and start now.”

  “But it’s the weekend of the Fourth! We’ve got ordinary policing to do—”

  “Not with forensics people, you don’t. Call the state police in to help if you have to. Oh, and one more thing. Look through drawers. We need to find photograph albums, or loose photographs, or wherever it is the Warings put their snapshots of things like family outings. My guess is that there will be formal photograph albums all done up with those little corner holders. We need to find those, and we need to start going through them. And be very careful. If we’re going to find fingerprints or DNA, those are going to be the most likely places.”

  “In the photograph albums,” Jason Battlesea said.

  “In the photograph albums,” Gregor said. “Just get it done, and I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  “Where are you?” Jason Battlesea asked.

  “I’m in New York,” Gregor said. “And don’t ask why now. I think I’m running out of cell phone battery.”

  SIX

  1

  It was the third of July and in spite of the legendary work ethic of Wall Street lawyers, men and women were clearing out of the office as fast as they could go. Kyle Westervan was sitting at his desk, wondering if there was something wrong with him. His briefcase was on the desk in front of him, locked. He had been staring at it for fifteen minutes. He had not been able to move.

  “Cheesecake,” he had said into the phone just fifteen minutes ago, after he listened to the usual opening.

  “Cohen’s Kosher Deli,” was the way the phone had been answered when he called.

  “It all sounds ridiculous,” they’d told him when they started this.

  At the time, he hadn’t agreed. Cloak-and-dagger was cloak-and-dagger. You went with it or you didn’t. It had taken all this time to feel that the entire situation was just stupid. At this point, looking out his open office door at the empty corridor, it didn’t even seem real.

  “No, I’ll come down and pick it up,” he’d told them.

  That was standard, too. They asked if he wanted his food delivered. He told them he’d come down and pick it up.

  He forced himself to his feet. He took the briefcase off the desk. It felt unbelievably heavy.

  He went out into the corridor. There was nobody there. He looked into the few offices with their doors open. They were all shut down for the night. He went through what the assistants called CubicleLand, where the paralegals worked. The cubicles were all empty, too. Even the receptionist at the front desk was gone, her little clutch of photographs in silver frames all put away in a locked desk drawer for the night.

  He went through the lobby and into the foyer. He went down in the elevator to the first floor. Kyle said good evening to the night guard and went out into the street. The street instantly made him feel better. It was not so empty, and it was very much the real world. Maybe he had begun to feel he no longer lived in the real world.

  Maybe he had felt that way from the moment he started working on Wall Street.

  Cohen’s Kosher Deli was half deserted, which was good. Kyle went in through the front door and asked the woman at the register about his cheesecake. She found it in a little pile of bags behind the counter and handed it to him. He paid for it and looked around. The man he had never known as anything but “Andy” was sitting in the
last booth but one against the back, the ones without the windows.

  “Well?” Andy said as Kyle sat down across from him.

  Kyle shrugged. “I don’t think you want me to take ten stacks of five-hundred-dollar bills out right here in the restaurant.”

  “Of course I don’t,” Andy said. “I wasn’t happy that night when you had to take them home.”

  “They’re all counted, Andy. I’m not going to rip you off.”

  “I didn’t say you were. But things happen. Traffic accidents. Traffic stops. You could have been pulled over by a policeman. Then what would you have done?”

  “I’d have had a very hard time explaining why all that money was in the glove compartment without blowing your cover.”

  “Your problem is that you always want to be funny,” Andy said. “This kind of thing isn’t funny. And it isn’t safe. Our marks don’t routinely kill off our informants, but they have been known to do it once or twice. You might at least try to consider that.”

  “I have considered it,” Kyle said. Then he looked around him and felt instantly depressed. “Everything is in the briefcase. And I do mean everything. Including the tape of the two of us talking. And he didn’t send an aide.”

  “Really?” Andy looked impressed.

  Kyle shrugged. “It’s not the Nixon administration,” he said. “Aides don’t fall on their swords and go to jail for their bosses these days. They write tell-all books. So he came himself. The great Senator Durham of South Carolina.”

  “You hear about this kind of thing, but you don’t ever really believe it,” Andy said. “There’s still something in my head that says these guys are too smart, too successful, too clued in to the way the world works to get involved in this kind of thing. How much did the senator give you?”

  “Ten stacks of five-hundred-dollar bills. Twenty bills to the stack. You do the math.”

  “A hundred thousand dollars? In cash? In your briefcase?”

  “Exactly. And the tape. And it was an easy tape to get. I hate it when I have to wear that buttonhole thing.”

  “And the tape says?”

  “It’s explicit enough, Andy, trust me. There’s no doubt about what he’s trying to do. And I’m going to need a receipt for this money, so you’d better find a way to check it discreetly.”

  Andy looked around the deli. There were a few people sitting along the counter, but they were all up near the cash register. Kyle felt the briefcase slide past his leg under the table. A moment later, Andy had it up and open and his head down over it.

  Andy snapped the briefcase shut. He put it back down on the floor again, but near his own leg instead of Kyle’s. Kyle felt the other briefcase being slid toward him. Andy reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket and took out a pad and pen.

  “You’d think they’d have at least a modicum of common sense,” Andy said, “and they never do.”

  “It’s the time and the place,” Kyle said. “It’s tax-free money. And the money is all that matters.”

  “The money was always all that mattered,” Andy said.

  “Maybe,” Kyle said.

  “No maybe about it,” Andy said. “Can you imagine Steve Durham pulling a stunt like this for anything but money? Bringing some guy a hundred thousand dollars in cash, in the middle of the day, coming all the way up here from Washington, the whole bit—can you imagine him doing it for any other reason?”

  “No,” Kyle said. “But it wasn’t Senator Durham I was thinking about.”

  “Who were you thinking about? Mother Teresa? She did a lot for money, too, even if it wasn’t to buy herself Mercedes convertibles. The whole world runs on money.”

  Andy wrote a long note on the top page of the pad, signed it at the bottom, and handed it across the table to Kyle. Kyle read it through very carefully and then folded it up and put it in his pocket.

  “Have you ever heard of Dr. Jonas Salk?” he asked Andy.

  Andy had ordered himself a cheesecake of his own. Now that business had been concluded, he was happily eating it.

  “Not a clue,” he said.

  “He was a guy back in the forties and fifties who discovered one of the first really effective vaccines for polio,” Kyle said. “There was another guy around the same time who discovered one, too, but the guy you hear about is always Salk. He was a doctor at a time when doctors didn’t get rich, and he discovered the vaccine in a back room. He wasn’t part of a big research staff. Anyway, he discovered this vaccine, and the offers came pouring in to have him lease the rights to it to drug companies. He could have gotten hugely rich. People were willing to pay anything to make sure their children didn’t get polio, and there were polio epidemics almost every summer.”

  “So?” Andy asked. “Did he end his days living in the Caribbean with native girls?”

  “There are no native girls in the Caribbean,” Kyle said. “And he ended his days in a modest two-story house where he’d lived for most of his adult life. He didn’t make a dime out of the polio vaccine. He gave the formula away for free on condition that the people who made the stuff also give it away or free. He thought making sure no child ever again got polio was more important than the money.”

  Andy shook his head. “If you think I’m going to admire that, I don’t. It’s a stupid Hollywood gesture. You need money to survive in this world, and there’s no point in scraping by if you don’t have to. I don’t see you scraping by. You had a job with Legal Aid. You didn’t stay there.”

  “No,” Kyle admitted. “I didn’t.”

  “And that friend of yours out in Alwych,” Andy said. “Tim what’s his name, that runs the clinic.”

  “Brand,” Kyle said.

  “He may spend his time running a free clinic, but he’s got trust fund money out the wazoo. He isn’t putting himself in any danger of going broke.”

  “No, he isn’t.”

  “Life’s a bitch and then you die,” Andy said. “There isn’t anything that would make me sit still with scraping by if I didn’t have to. And the only reason why I don’t go for the kind of thing the senator did is that I know I wouldn’t get away with it.”

  “I’ve got to go,” Kyle said. “I’m supposed to be doing something with fireworks for a party tonight. Tomorrow’s the Fourth of July.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Do you think it was all about the money for them, too?” Kyle asked. “John Adams. George Washington. Thomas Jefferson.”

  “Sure it was,” Andy said. “They were a bunch of rich guys who didn’t want to pay taxes to Great Britain. I can’t believe you’re having this fit. You never struck me as that kind of guy.”

  “I never struck me as that kind of guy, either,” Kyle said.

  He got out of the booth and reached under the table for the briefcase that was identical to the one he’d brought, but much lighter. Then he walked down the length of the deli and out into the bright hot air.

  2

  By eight o’clock, Tim Brand was willing to admit that there was not going to be much business at the clinic for the night. He went out the back door to sit on the low stone wall next to the stairs that led up to Main Street. It was usually quiet back there, except for the nurses taking cigarette breaks.

  He took his cell phone out of his pocket and checked for messages, but there were none of any importance. He took out a package of Altoids peppermints and opened it. He stuck three of the things in his mouth and felt his tongue burn.

  There was a noise at the top of the cement stairs and he looked up. A woman was coming down toward him, wearing a longish skirt and a T-shirt and espadrilles. He knew who she was immediately, but what his mind told him was: She’s still eighteen.

  The woman got to the bottom of the stairs, and the face became—well, not eighteen anymore.

  We’re both forty-eight, Tim thought.

  Virginia came the rest of the way down the stairs and took a seat a little ways from him on the stone wall. Then she took a pack of cigarettes out
of the pocket of her skirt and lit up.

  “I can’t do this in public anymore,” she said. “Put a picture of this in the paper and I’m probably done. I love cigarettes, though. I think it’s one of the great injustices of the world that they aren’t good for you.”

  “They are good for you in some ways,” Tim said. “It’s just that, in other ways, they kill you. I thought you’d quit.”

  “I thought I’d quit, too. I smoke about five of the things a day now. It’s better than the old three packs.”

  Tim watched as Virginia studied her cigarette. People rarely noticed it, but they looked remarkably alike. It wasn’t that common in fraternal twins.

  “Is there a reason for the visit?” he asked. “It can’t be just because you’re in town. You’re in town a lot without coming to see me.”

  “I could say I came because there are things I wanted to know, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Well,” Virginia said, “I’d like to know why it’s all right for you to do what you do and at the same time deny women common ordinary things men would expect to have without issue, but when I fight for women to have those things, I’m just advancing a selfish agenda. I’d like to know why denying and depriving and restricting women is an acceptable foible in someone doing Good Works, when it wouldn’t be an acceptable foible to treat anybody else that way. Why is it, Tim, that what women need is always a side issue?”

  “I’m not depriving or denying anyone anything,” Tim said. “I am living according to the dictates of my conscience, just as you’re living according to the dictates of yours.”

  “And the dictates of your conscience say what? That what women need, what they want, what they hope, what they dream—that all that doesn’t matter? That they’re nothing but broodmares for the social order? That nothing about them is really human except the content of their wombs?”

  “We’re not going to get anywhere with this, Virginia. We’ve done it before.”

  “I know,” Virginia said.