Then, when Lauren rose from the dead, she was caught on camera with Spencer Waits, her half-brother, the son of the same Valentine Waits. Although he didn’t yet have any proof, Evan guessed that it was men working for Valentine Waits who were at this very moment searching for Lauren, prepared to go to any lengths to get the answers they wanted.
And here was Crow, calling him now, despite his aversion to speaking on the telephone.
‘Uncle Elwood,’ Evan said, ‘I thought you didn’t like phones.’
A soft chuckle came down the line.
‘I like the sound of that. Uncle Elwood. And no, I don’t like the telephone. You never know who’s listening in.’
‘Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you, eh?’
‘Exactly. You’d do well to bear it in mind. It doesn’t only apply to the telephone either. However, when it’s a matter that’s on the public record, one doesn’t have to be quite so circumspect. And I couldn’t bring myself to drag you over here just to tell you that I found one more name on the list of shareholders in David Eckert’s company.’
Evan could have ended the call then and there. Crow didn’t need to say another word.
‘Valentine Waits.’
‘Good boy,’ Crow responded with unusual enthusiasm. ‘Your time spent with me is paying dividends. We’ll make an investigator of you yet.’
Evan laughed out loud. Trust Crow to somehow take the credit for everything. But who else could it be? If NASA had announced that a thirteenth man had now walked on the Moon’s surface to join Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and the others in that select company, Evan would have expected to hear that his name was Valentine Waits.
‘You can tell me what it all means later,’ Crow said.
‘Did you find out about the other thing? When exactly did Robbie Clayton disappear?’
Crow tut-tutted.
‘So impatient. I haven’t done it yet. I’m an old man, remember.’
‘I suppose you take a nap in the afternoons as well.’
‘Every day.’
Evan didn’t bother arguing further. He was more likely to take a nap than Crow. They ended the call with Crow promising to get right on it. He wished he hadn’t brought it up. He pushed all thoughts of Adamson’s story and his demands and his own doubts and fears from his mind. He’d cross that bridge when he came to it.
He sat digesting the new information. In addition to the personal relationships, there was now an increasingly incestuous web of business connections. David Eckert, Jake Kincade, George Ivanovsky and Valentine Waits had all at some stage owned part of the company called Jumpin Jake’s, the company Lauren had worked for. And Eckert was another of the people who claimed they didn’t know who Valentine Waits was.
He was missing something glaringly obvious. He kept seeing the image of a man opening the back door of Eckert’s aircraft hangar, a man who had immediately withdrawn before he caught sight of his face. Had Jake Kincade come back? If he’d ever gone anywhere in the first place. He only had the word of David Eckert and Eva Rivera, two confirmed liars, that he’d disappeared in the first place. Even supposing they hadn’t lied about that fact, why had he returned now? It had to be connected in some way with his daughter’s miraculous resurrection.
The problem he was struggling with at the moment was which liar to confront with which lie. He had George Ivanovsky, David Eckert and Eva Rivera to choose from, maybe Arturo Rivera. Despite his willingness to talk, Evan reckoned he knew a lot more. He just hadn’t asked the right questions.
As it turned out, he would never get a second chance to ask Arturo Rivera those questions, even if he figured out what they were.
Chapter 40
FRESH AIR NEVER KILLED anyone. That lesson had been drummed into Evan from an early age in his father’s 1973 Ford F-150 pickup. As a boy he’d assumed the windows were broken because he couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t open, even in sub-zero temperatures. Today, however, fresh air was definitely a contributory factor in somebody’s death.
It was time to talk to George Ivanovsky again. Since it was now a beautiful day, Evan folded away the Corvette’s roof to make the most of it on the drive over, maybe clear his mind some. Guillory was partly to blame as well. If she hadn’t ribbed him about what a pussy he was behind the wheel, he might not have put his foot down so hard.
The end result was, with the top down and the wind in his hair, the big V8 engine adding its throaty roar to the mix, he didn’t have a hope of hearing his cellphone ringing as he powered through the curves where Lauren’s car had supposedly lost traction. He stopped again at the spot where her car had gone over the edge, but his phone had long since stopped ringing, the last call the person on the other end ever made missed.
He got out and admired the view, resting his butt on the front fender. The engine was hot, a faint smell of burning oil in the air. He made a mental note to have it looked over before making the trip to Baltimore in it. The last thing he wanted was to break down at the side of the road with Guillory in the car with him. He’d never hear the end of it.
He drove the rest of the way to Ivanovsky’s house at a more sedate pace, keeping a watchful eye on the dash. Without the rush of the wind in his face and the engine throbbing instead of screaming, he’d have heard a call on his phone if it rang now. But it was already far too late for that.
He rang Ivanovsky’s bell, wondering if he’d had a call from his sister, Eva Rivera, warning him of a likely visit. Whether he had or not, Ivanovsky didn’t look surprised to see him. There was an acceptance as if something that he’d always known would happen had finally come to pass. Evan paused again at the photograph on the wall, the one of Ivanovsky’s namesake, Dmitri, the Russian microbiologist. It wasn’t the photograph itself that interested him as much as the faint dirty outline of a different picture that had hung there previously. Last time when he’d noticed it, he’d thought nothing of it. Now, he’d have bet dollars to Donuts that the same picture that hung in Eva Rivera’s hallway had hung in this one.
He’d asked Ivanovsky how he spent his time in retirement given he didn’t have time to re-paint the wall, and Ivanovsky closed the door in his face. It was obvious now.
‘Do you still fly?’
Ivanovsky gave a rueful smile, invited Evan into the same front room they’d gone into last time. Evan wondered if the group photograph was on the wall in the other room.
‘Not for a number of years, more’s the pity,’ Ivanovsky said.
Evan nodded like he knew how it was.
‘Since before or after you sold your holding in Jumpin’ Jake’s?’
It got the effect he’d been hoping for. Ivanovsky looked as if he should be back in the morgue. But on the slab this time. The color drained from his face, his jaw slack. He dropped heavily into an easy chair as if his legs had given way. Evan stayed standing, his back to the window.
‘Last time we spoke,’ Evan said, ‘we were talking about the death of Lauren Stone, and I asked you how come you remembered all the details so well. Do you remember what you said?’
Ivanovsky shook his head. It wasn’t so much, no I can’t remember, so much as, no this can’t be happening.
‘You said it was because it was so sad. Do you want to tell me the real reason?’
Ivanovsky shook his head again, but this time it was an angry shake. Some of the color came back into his cheeks.
‘What’s the point? You know anyway.’
‘Because she was your niece. Your sister Kristina’s daughter, who was brought up by your other sister, Eva, after Kristina died.’
‘I never tried to hide it.’
‘You didn’t volunteer the information either.’
‘Any reason why I should have?’
‘We both know the answer to that,’ Evan said. ‘I don’t know ethics about whether you should have performed the autopsy on a close relative, but that’s not the issue here, is it? Because you didn’t autopsy Lauren, did
you? Because she didn’t die in that crash.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Of course she did. I think you should leave now.’
Evan pulled out his phone. He saw he had a missed call, didn’t bother looking to see who it was from. If it was important, they’d have called back. He found the picture of Lauren embracing Spencer Waits. He held the phone towards Ivanovsky.’
‘Recognize her?’
Ivanovsky glanced at the phone. Nothing registered in his face, except perhaps a deepening acceptance of the inevitable. The color that had momentarily returned to his face had drained away again. His skin had the same deathly pallor as the people he’d spent his life cutting open.
‘That was taken recently. You’re a medical man, a believer in science. I don’t suppose you believe in resurrection from the dead.’
‘I need a drink,’ Ivanovsky said.
He led Evan into the back room, went directly to the drinks cabinet. He gestured towards Evan with a bottle of Vodka but Evan didn’t notice. He was too busy looking at the photograph on the wall. He’d been right. It was the same one as he had on his phone and which hung in Eva Rivera’s hallway. He heard ice cubes dropped into a glass, the sound of liquid poured on top of it. He didn’t hear a mixer being added. Ivanovsky joined him standing in front of the photograph.
‘That’s Kristina—’
‘And that’s Jake, her husband. And who’s that?’
He pointed at Valentine Waits to see how truthful Ivanovsky was likely to be, gauge how much reliance to put on his answers. There was a slight pause, but so fast as to not matter. Ivanovsky saw the futility of playing games, was resigned to telling the truth.
‘Valentine Waits, Kristina’s first husband.’
‘What was he like?’
He tried to make it casual. It didn’t work.
‘If you’re asking me that, it’s because you already know. I’d call him evil incarnate, a spiritual and moral vacuum.’
‘Why?’
Ivanovsky downed the clear liquid in his glass in one. As the neat vodka hit the back of his throat he grimaced. But Evan reckoned it was to hide any expression on his face as he spoke.
‘Keep this up and you’ll find out.’
Evan had a nasty suspicion Ivanovsky was right and it wouldn’t be too long before it was proven so.
‘If he’s so bad, how come everybody has a picture on their wall with him in it?’
‘Because it’s the only picture I’ve got of Kristina. And—’
He shook his head. Evan saw the muscles on his jaw clench, saw his fingers tighten around his empty glass. It would have shattered if Ivanovsky had been a younger, stronger man.
‘And what? Don’t say it doesn’t matter either.’
Ivanovsky drew in a massive breath through his nose, let it out again. The muscles along his jaw relaxed.
‘As a reminder to us all.’
Evan’s mouth was open to ask the obvious question when Ivanovsky held up his hand.
‘You can ask me until you’re blue in the face but I will not say what it is a reminder of. I will tell you what I did, nothing more.’
There was a finality to his words that was impossible to ignore. Evan decided he’d get what he could. The rest would follow, most likely sooner than he wanted.
‘Okay. Tell me about Lauren.’
Ivanovsky got himself a refill and suggested they go back into the front room. It was as if he needed a solid wall between himself and the drinks cabinet if he was to have any chance of not emptying the bottle. It might have been why he’d chosen the front room in the first place. They sat in two easy chairs facing each other. Ivanovsky put his glass on the floor.
‘Lauren needed to disappear completely—’
‘Is this anything to do with Waits?’
Ivanovsky considered him shrewdly, his eyes narrowed. It wasn’t such a leap—Waits had a reputation and was deeply involved—but Evan reckoned it made Ivanovsky think. Made him choose his words more carefully.
‘I said I wouldn’t tell you anything more than my involvement. If you’re not prepared to continue on that basis, you can leave now.’
Evan shrugged, have it your way.
‘She approached me because of my job. She had it all worked out, the crash, the—’
‘What about the body?’
Ivanovsky looked down as he picked at hard skin on his palm. When he spoke, his words were addressed to the hands in his lap. His voice was as dead as the person he was about to describe.
‘If a body can’t be identified and remains unclaimed, it is eventually cremated. They used to be buried at the taxpayers’ expense but the law was changed and now they are cremated. It’s much less expensive. And there are always unidentified, unclaimed bodies.’
He took another huge breath, let it out in a noisy rush of air as if he wanted to get it out of his mouth as fast as possible, along with the words describing what he had done. Evan gave him time. It can’t have been easy, being put in an impossible position by his own niece.
‘The body that I identified as . . . as Lauren belonged to a young woman, a crack addict. She was set on fire in an alley. Whether it was other addicts or a gang of vicious thugs having some fun, I don’t know. But she was doused with gasoline and set alight. Unlike the story we fabricated regarding the car crash, this poor woman wasn’t knocked unconscious first. She was very much awake. One can only hope she was so high she wasn’t fully aware of what was going on.’
Ivanovsky leaned forward and picked up his drink, downed it in one and dropped the empty glass on the floor. He lay back in the chair, his head angled upwards, staring at the ceiling.
‘Lauren supplied me with a copy of her dental records. The forensic dentist who would normally have matched them to the corpse was off sick at the time. In his absence, I was responsible for certifying that there was a match.
‘I’m not proud of what I did, but there is one saving grace. At least the poor woman who was burned to death in that alley didn’t die for nothing. She helped save another woman’s life when she was already dead. Not many people can claim something like that.’
He lapsed into silence, didn’t seem to realize that he had let slip more than he planned to. Evan now knew that whatever it was that forced Lauren into faking her own death, the consequences of not doing so would have resulted in her actual death shortly thereafter.
‘I filled out . . . falsified all the paperwork—’
Without warning, the window exploded, cutting him off, shards of glass raining down on them. Ivanovsky yelped in surprise. Evan jerked backwards in his chair. With his mind still full of images of flames and bodies burning in a car, windshields blowing out and twisted metal, he leapt from his seat, his eyes scanning the floor, searching for a Molotov cocktail, expecting at any minute to see the carpet and curtains burst into flames.
Instead, he saw a brick bounce once in the shattered glass that carpeted the floor, then come to a rest. He ran to the window, saw a van burning rubber as it disappeared down the street. It might have been the same one, it might not. A lot of vans looked the same, especially from the back. Ivanovsky was still sitting in his chair, the shock immobilizing him, his fingers digging into the arms as if he was scared somebody might try to prise him out of it.
Evan picked up the brick. There was a sheet of paper taped to the front of it, a message scrawled across it.
You’re next.
It wasn’t very subtle or original. But it was effective. Ivanovsky looked as if he needed a change of underwear. A clue to what he was next in line for was attached to the note. Not taped to it but inserted through it as if it was pinning the note to the brick.
Evan glanced at Ivanovsky, wondered if he was up to being shown what it was.
‘What is it?’ Ivanovsky said.
Evan slowly turned the brick in his hand, showed it to him. Ivanovsky read the note, swallowed drily. But, like Evan, it was the other object that drew his eyes. Anyone would be
the same. He picked up his glass and raised it to his lips before he noticed it was already empty. He let his arm drop, the glass slipping from his fingers, half-melted ice cubes joining the mess of broken glass on the floor.
‘You recognize that?’ Evan said.
Ivanovsky nodded, waiting a moment before he trusted his voice. He laughed nervously, a high-pitched sound that instantly got on Evan’s nerves, set his teeth on edge.
‘I’m not so senile I’d forget one of those.’
‘Is this what you use to sew up bodies?’
Ivanovsky swallowed again which was as good as a yes.
Evan pulled it out of the note and held it up to the light. It was a curved surgical needle with a length of black thread trailing from it. All ready and waiting for the next cadaver. He touched the tip, drew a pinprick of blood.
Ivanovsky stuck out his hand. Evan offered him the needle and thread.
‘No, let me see the note.’
Evan handed him the brick with the note still attached. Ivanovsky held it, resting it in his lap. He stared at the two words for a long time.
‘Next for what?’ he said, a tremor in his voice. ‘For what?’
That’s the point, Evan thought and didn’t say. Let your imagination do their job for them. By the time they come back to follow through on the threat, your own mind will have come up with a thousand horrific scenarios.
Ivanovsky tried to get out of the chair. His legs wouldn’t support him and he fell back heavily into it with a loud groan.
‘Is it about what I did? They’re going to do it to me?’
Evan didn’t think it was that at all. It wasn’t about what Ivanovsky had done in the past, it was about what Evan was doing now, in the present. Sticking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted, asking questions. That’s when he started to get a very bad feeling about the morning and the call he’d missed. Because the word next has a very definite implication—that somebody else has already had their turn.
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