Tailspin

  She never looked away from the stack of bills.

  “The first one’s on account,” Savich said, and pushed one of the bills to her, “to prove my good intent.” Angel grabbed it and stuffed it in her bra.

  “There’s nothing like green next to your skin,” she said, and gave him a huge smile. “Okay, I can give you useful stuff. After three bourbons, straight up, Roddy started bitching, told me he should be paid more to handle this situation. Roddy always talked like that—you know, making words sound important. He said it was pissant dough for his talents, like that. I almost shouted at him, ‘Dude, you’re old and nasty, who’d want to pay you anything?’ But I had a nice place to stay and Roddy was easy and fast in bed, so I kept my trap shut. Roddy said it was a real rush deal. He was going in and out of this hick town like right now, and so he didn’t have time to check anything out, said he hated going in blind, but from what I could tell, that’s what he always did, just waltzed right in somewhere and hoped for the best. What a dumbass. Is that useful?”

  “Not very,” Savich said, and fingered a second hundred, his eyes on her face.

  Angel’s hands fluttered toward the second bill. She said, “Okay, I’ll admit I was listening when the phone rang—that’s how I knew he got the job. He knew whoever it was, and he was real respectful, assured whoever it was that he could handle anything, to trust him, lame stuff like that.”

  “He didn’t say a name?”

  “No, he listened, then kept telling whoever it was that he’d take care of it, no problem.”

  “When he hung up, what did he say?”

  “He said he had to move fast, that he had to drive to this hick town in Kentucky tomorrow, he had to leave real early Monday morning. Oh yeah, he wrote down lots of stuff. Directions, I guess. Then this photo came through his fax machine.”

  Savich pushed the second hundred-dollar bill across the table. It disappeared into her bra.

  “Okay, the fax—it was a woman, young, pretty, okay blond hair”—she tossed her head again—“but she had this real cool braid. So I asked him what he was going to do to her and he said, nothing much, just put out her lights, and he slogged down another shot of bourbon. While he poured, I picked up her photo—it was off a driver’s license, but like I said, I could tell she was pretty even though the picture was crap. When I get a driver’s license I’m going to sleep with the guy taking the pictures so I can get me a good one.”

  Savich began to smooth out the third one-hundred-dollar bill.

  “He grabbed the fax from me, started talking to himself, like, ‘I need a full clip, maybe two, that’ll do it. Cheap bastards, ’ on and on like that, you know?”

  Bastards. Plural. Savich nodded. “Angel, by any chance did Roddy ever use your cell phone?”

  She thought about that, and Savich could see her mental wheels spinning. “Well, yeah, maybe, a couple of times.”

  “How long ago did the graduate student trade your services for a cell phone?”

  “Well, I guess I should tell you I gave that grad student a smiley face when I was living with Roddy.”

  “And you still have your cell?”

  “Yeah, sure, but like I told you, it’s deader than the fish my uncle Bobby shot out of the water when he was aiming for my little brother.”

  No, Savich thought, don’t go there. “I’d like to borrow your cell phone, Angel. I’ll return it. In fact, I’ll pay you a rental fee. What do you say?”

  Greed gleamed in those innocent eyes. “How much you willing to pay me? It’s a good phone, lots of fancy things on it. Well, to be honest here, and that hurts real bad, I don’t think it’s got many minutes on it now.”

  “However many minutes you’ve got will be perfect,” Savich said.

  “You know, a cell phone’s like a guy; if you don’t plug him in every night, charge him good, you got nothing at all.”

  Savich slid two bills across the table as Angel dug her cell phone out of her pocket. “I need some lipstick, but they wouldn’t give me my purse. They didn’t take my cell because it’s dead, I guess.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll return it nicely charged.” Savich rose, left the last hundred-dollar bill on the table. “Sherlock, why don’t you give Angel your lipstick. It’s a real pretty shade. See if you can’t make her earn that last hundred.”

  He said to Angel, “I’ll see you soon. I think your information was so valuable that I’m going to speak to the people in charge and have all charges dropped.”

  She gaped at him.

  He held up his hand. “Wait, Angel. I will do this if you swear to me you’ll call this number.” He handed her a card. “This guy helps kids like you. Will you call him?”

  He saw the lie in her eyes. “Oh yes, Mr. Special Agent, I’ll call . . . Mr. Hanratty right away.”

  He shook her hand and left her and Sherlock to look at the lipstick. He joined the assistant director of the facility, Mrs. Limber, in the hallway. “It’s going very well,” he told her. “Thanks for letting us deal with her alone. I’m going to see if I can’t get her released.”

  Mrs. Limber, soft as a pillow and wearing huge glasses, patted his shoulder. “Angel has guts and brains, but she’s got a larcenous soul. Some do, you know.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I know, but—”

  “She’s also a freight train—she won’t stop. I see you’ve got Angel’s dead cell phone. Would you like to borrow a charger?”

  Inside the small interview room, Sherlock smiled at the lovely shade of dark pink Angel smoothed on her lips. “Very nice. Yep, you keep it, the mirror, too.”

  “I want a Big Mac,” Angel said, and tossed her hair.

  Sherlock fingered the last hundred. “Why don’t you tell me how you met Roddy.”

  When Sherlock found Savich, he was sitting under a tree in front of the detention facility, humming and playing with Angel’s cell.

  He looked up. “Did she earn the last hundred?”

  “Yep, and now our budding Donald Trump owns my lipstick, mirror, and a comb. Oh yeah, she told me you should keep her cell; with all the cash she got off you, she’s going to buy herself a iPhone. She can’t wait to leave this place in the dust. I don’t know, Dillon, I just don’t know.”

  “Sometimes you gotta cut the fish loose. You’re not going to believe what I found on the cell.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Wednesday afternoon

  This has got to be heaven.”

  Rachael stared around the large reception area on the thirtieth floor of the Abbott-Cavendish building on the corner of South Calvert Street. Her breathing quickened. “Oh my, would you look at those beauties. Jimmy told me Laurel is an expert on Chippendale furniture and filled the place with originals, but he never brought me here, said he couldn’t stand the stuff.” She looked around at the mint-condition Chippendale chairs and tables and felt her pulse race. “He was wrong,” she said, lightly running her fingers over a chair back. “How could anyone hate these? They’re exquisite. Just touch the wood, Jack, so smooth and perfect. It’s mahogany from the West Indies. And this chair leg—it’s called the cabriole leg, his signature form.”

  Jack looked at the elegantly curved chair leg, at the turned feet, then back at her. He said slowly, “I knew you could come into my house and do this and that and it’d look a lot nicer than it does now, but you also know all about antiques?”

  “Particularly Chippendale. Would you look at that lowboy, at the elaborate carving. It screams eighteenth century. Do you know he never used a maker’s mark? To prove authenticity, you need to be able to trace the piece back to the original invoice.”

  What was a lowboy? Was she joking? An invoice from the eighteenth century?

  Jack said, “No, I didn’t know that.” He listened to her talk about how Americans like Queen Anne splats and kidney-shaped seats, how they prefer cherrywood to mahogany. Those fancy cabriole legs sank at least three inches into the thick, expensive carpeting. You
couldn’t pay him to sit in one of those chairs.

  “And the three Turners,” Rachael went on. “Jimmy did like those paintings. I remember him telling me about them. They belonged to his mother.” She looked around the reception area, lust in her eyes. “To have a huge budget to decorate a space like this—wouldn’t that be something? I decorated a half-dozen commercial spaces in and around Richmond. I had to work my butt off to be both creative and cheap.”

  “Did your clients appreciate what you did?”

  “They all did, and that’s nice. Actually, I prefer being in on the design process itself, though, creating a space for a specific look and a specific function. My client list was growing nicely before I went to meet Jimmy.”

  They heard a throat clear and looked over at two young women and two young men seated behind a huge swath of highly polished mahogany, each seated at an individual computer station, all nicely dressed, all working industriously on keyboards or speaking in hushed voices on phones. Except for one young woman, who had a raised eyebrow and beautiful fingernails.

  Jack smiled at Rachael, nodded toward the young woman. “Let’s go hassle that bright-eyed young lass at reception, see where our prey is.”

  The young lass—her tag read Julia—looked suspicious at first, then fell victim to Jack’s smile, a phenomenon Rachael had already observed a couple of times. It seemed Julia couldn’t help herself, she loosened up, smiled back at him. “Good afternoon. How may I help you?”

  Jack opened his wallet, showed her his creds.

  Julia’s smiled wavered.

  “We’d like to see Ms. Kostas, Julia.”

  “Ah, well, yes, may I tell her what it’s about?”

  “No,” he said. Then he smiled that lethal smile again, lowered his voice. “National security.”

  Julia immediately rang a number and spoke quietly.

  “I’ll show you to her office,” she said. They followed her down a wide hallway with Stubbs horse paintings on the walls. There were half a dozen niches along the way holding antique vases filled with lush trailing ivy, warmed by small circular overhead lights.

  Julia knocked lightly on a set of mahogany double doors, opened them, and they stepped into a large rectangular room furnished with spare, plain blond Scandinavian furniture, not a single antique in the place. Lots of windows filled the room with afternoon sunlight and views to die for, but still the office felt cold.

  “Ms. Kostas, this is Special Agent Crowne and, ah . . .” Julia turned brick red because she’d neglected to ask Rachael her name.

  “I know who she is, Julia. You may leave us now.”

  Jack had read all about Laurel Abbott Kostas on the drive over to Abbott Enterprises International headquarters in Baltimore. He’d studied several unflattering photos of her. She wasn’t by any stretch a beauty. Still, given the wealth factor, he’d expected her to have at least a hint of glam, designer everything, but there wasn’t a scintilla of pizzazz in this woman. Her eyes never left Rachael as she slowly walked toward them. Her hair was neither short nor long, salt-and-pepper, not a sophisticated salt-and-pepper like his mom’s, whose hair was cut in a swinging bob, but flat, drab, and coarse. She wore no earrings, no makeup to soften the sharp angles of her face. Her eyes beneath thick black brows were cold stone gray, her mouth pinched and small. She was wearing a plain gray suit and low-heeled pumps, her sole jewelry a wedding band. She didn’t look fat or thin; what she looked like was a hard matron, or a prison warden. She wasn’t smiling. She looked older than her fifty-one years. He wondered what she’d looked like at twenty-one, what she’d looked like when she married Stefanos Kostas at age thirty-five.

  “Hello, Aunt Laurel.”

  Laurel Abbott Kostas looked at Rachael with a combination of distaste and indifference, and there was something else, something feral in those eyes of hers. “You are a bastard, Ms. Janes. It’s very possible you are not even my brother’s unfortunate mistake. I am not your aunt, nor are you and I on a first-name basis.”

  Rachael said, “Actually, I’m no longer a bastard, which means you are indeed my aunt. Didn’t Jimmy tell you and Quincy that he adopted me? I became his legal daughter five days before his death. His lawyer, Mr. Cullifer, said the entire process took only five weeks, less time than it took the mechanic to fix his Jag, and then he smiled and said money and influence are very fine things.”

  “A fine tale, Ms. Janes. You will not call the senator by that ridiculous low-class name. His name was John James Abbott.”

  “He told me until I could get used to the idea of calling him Dad, I was to call him Jimmy. And now I’ll never have that chance.”

  Laurel Kostas’s hands clenched at her sides. “He did that to get back at us.” She sucked in a breath, calmed herself. Jack saw the take-no-prisoners iron in her, the formidable opponent who’d tear your heart out before breakfast, or, like Rachael had said, he could easily see her sucking the blood from your jugular. Old Man Abbott must have been proud of her. She looked briefly at Jack, dismissed him, then back at Rachael. “All right, you bullied your way in here. What’s this nonsense about national security? What do you really want?”

  “We’re here about Jimmy’s death.”

  Her eyes turned colder, if possible, and her mouth seamed as she said in her very precise voice, “What about his unfortunate death?”

  “He didn’t just die, he was murdered.”

  “That is absolute nonsense. Senator Abbott’s death was a tragic accident. It was ruled an accident by the police.”

  “Greg Nichols, his senior staffer, knew it wasn’t an accident.”

  “Everyone spoke to Greg Nichols. He was shocked and saddened by the tragedy. He believed it an accident, as well.

  “It has nothing to do with you, Ms. Janes—yes, I will call you that until I have proof you have told me the truth. Brady Cullifer would have called both Quincy and me if you had been legally adopted; he would have warned us. But he did not.”

  “Perhaps,” Rachael said, “Mr. Cullifer didn’t call you because he considered it a confidential matter.”

  “There are no confidences in a family, Ms. Janes. However, regardless of any legalities, I will never recognize you as an Abbott. I want you to get out of here. I never want to look at your face after today. You managed to bilk my brother out of his money and his property, that wonderful house in Chevy Chase where we all grew up. It’s in your hands, a stranger’s hands. Bastard or not, you have won. Get out of here before I call security.”

  Rachael said easily, “I brought security with me, Mrs. Kostas. Don’t you remember? This is Special Agent Jackson Crowne, with the FBI.”

  Laurel put out her hand. Short buffed nails, clear polish, but the thumbnails were chewed to the quick. Jack handed her his shield, watched her study it for an aeon before handing it back. “So,” she said, “this pathetic girl managed to talk the FBI into revisiting this national tragedy. Has she accused us of murdering Senator Abbott?”

  “Actually, ma’am, we have a lot of questions, not only about Senator Abbott’s death.”

  “You won’t for much longer,” Laurel said, reaching for her phone, and she turned her back to them. Jack hoped she wasn’t calling her lawyer. He really didn’t want to have to deal with that.

  Jack had faced down monsters during his years in the FBI’s Elite Crime Unit, and remembered every single one of them with utter clarity, but in this woman’s presence, listening to her low, clipped voice, he felt a sort of black coldness in her.

  He purposefully turned away and led Rachael to the huge window that looked toward the Inner Harbor, lined with tourists, the blue water of the harbor dotted with pleasure craft, ferries, and fishing boats. It looked intensely alive, very different from this frozen world so high above it. He was losing it.

  He said, “I know a little restaurant right on the Inner Harbor where I’d like to take you for dinner.”

  Rachael nodded.

  Jack couldn’t wait to get away from this cold, driven wom
an. It was very likely she wouldn’t talk to them. Had she held the family’s reputation so dear, had she believed her brother’s confession to the world would not only destroy her brother but cause irreparable damage to the family and to the Abbott holdings so much that she murdered her own brother? He couldn’t imagine it himself, it was too over the top.

  They heard Laurel Kostas hang up the phone, and turned.

  By the look on her face, she hadn’t gotten what she wanted. Jack was tempted to applaud, but he didn’t. He watched her face smooth out, and he knew to his gut that when this woman managed that slick-as-glass expression, she was in full control again.

  She radiated power and malice.

  “I spoke to my lawyer. He said he would call your superiors, who would deal with you, Agent Crowne. You will leave now. I will not speak to you.”

  Rachael said, “But Mrs. Kostas, don’t you want to know if your brother’s death really was an accident? Don’t you care that someone might have murdered him and gotten away with it? Didn’t you love your brother?”

  Jack saw feral rage on her face. She leaned forward, her palms splayed on the long expanse of smooth blond birch. “My brother’s drinking was unfortunate. Quincy and I told him many times to stop—at least not to drive when he drank too much—but he never listened to us, or to anyone. Quincy and I have wondered why he would drink to such an extent when his supposed precious daughter had magically returned to him. Both of us have wondered if he didn’t change his mind about you, if he was about to demand DNA tests, but didn’t have the chance—he died. Greg Nichols agrees it is strange, all of it, your appearance, my brother’s death.

  “You should be thanking me that we didn’t push the police to investigate you, particularly since you are the only one to gain by his death. Why have you involved the FBI? You think they wouldn’t consider you a prime suspect?”