The Melody Lingers On (4 page)

Our money helped pay for that fancy office.

And Judy had been so depressed and so sick that she had given up. He knew that was why she’d had the second stroke yesterday.

He knew she was dying.

Don’t die, Judy. Please don’t die.

The heart monitor beside the bed began to go off. It was a loud shrieking sound. In just a few seconds doctors and nurses were rushing into the room. One of them began pounding on Judy’s
chest.

Ranger could see that the blip on the screen that had been showing the heartbeats was no longer there. Now it was moving in a straight line.

He stared straight ahead. I can’t live without her, he thought numbly.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Cole,” the doctor was saying. “There was nothing we could do to save her.”

Ranger shook off the doctor’s hand and shoved it aside. He fell to his knees beside the bed. Ignoring the tubes that were still in her arms and nostrils, he put his arms around Judy and
held her close to him. Overwhelming grief vied with murderous anger. Anger won. Bennett was alive. He was sure of it. He didn’t know how he was going to make him suffer but he would find a
way.

“I will find a way, Judy,” he said aloud. “I promise you, I will find a way.”

I
n his office at the Federal Building in lower Manhattan FBI supervisor Rudy Schell listened as a victim of Parker Bennett talked to him about
Bennett’s supposed suicide. Unlike other victims, it was not rage that Sean Cunningham was exhibiting. It was with almost clinical detachment that he was making his case that if Bennett had
committed suicide in that area of the Caribbean, his body would almost certainly have washed up on the beach of Tortola.

Cunningham had made an exhaustive chart showing the currents around the spot where Bennett’s sailboat had crashed in Sharks Bay on the north end of Tortola.

“If he had committed suicide, his body should have surfaced around Rough Point,” Cunningham was saying.

Schell looked sympathetically across his desk at the man who was head of the Association for the Victims of Parker Bennett. A retired psychiatrist, Cunningham had recognized the devastating
effect the loss was having on the investors. He had made it a personal crusade to reach out and try to help them to adjust their changed circumstances. He had a website and urged victims to share
with each other their feelings of frustration, anger, and depression.

The response had been overwhelming. People who had been total strangers had become friends and had gotten together for meetings in their local areas.

Cunningham was thin, with white hair and rimless glasses. He looked every day of his seventy years, Schell thought, ten years older than when they had met two years ago.

In the course of the investigation they had become good friends. As some of the other victims reacted with numb disbelief, anger, and despair, Cunningham had remained calm. He had lost the
million-dollar trust fund he had set up for his two grandchildren. In response to Schell’s questions he had said, “My son has done very well. He can afford to educate his children. I am
deprived only of my joy in leaving a gift that would have bought them their first houses.”

In the past two years Cunningham had spent a major amount of his time counseling many of the victims who were having difficulty putting their lives back together. At this point in the
investigation Schell could not tell the doctor that the FBI’s nautical experts had already come to the same conclusion. Ninety-nine to one Parker Bennett was still alive.

They were on a first-name basis. “Rudy, are you humoring me or do you think his so-called suicide was staged?” Cunningham asked now.

Schell replied carefully. “Sean, there is always that possibility. And given the way Bennett managed to hide what he was doing from the accountants and the SEC, it’s entirely
possible that he was able to get away with staging his death.” He paused. “At least he’s gotten away with it so far.”

“Did you hear that Judy Cole died this morning?” Cunningham asked.

“No, I didn’t. How did Ranger react?”

“It’s hard to tell. I called him. He was very quiet. He said that the second stroke left Judy so disabled that he knew she wouldn’t want to live if she’d learned how bad
it would be.”

“That doesn’t sound like Ranger Cole. When we interviewed him two years ago, he was like a man possessed. I think if he had bumped into Bennett at that point, he would have killed
him with his bare hands.”

“I’ll keep in close touch with him.” Cunningham stood up. “Shall I leave you the nautical charts I made? I have another copy.”

Schell did not hint that the FBI charts were virtually identical to the ones Cunningham had prepared. “I definitely want them for the file. Thanks.”

When Cunningham was gone, Rudy leaned back in his chair and, in a characteristic gesture, ran the palm of his hand along his cheek. He could feel the stubble that was already beginning to grow
on his face. He smiled at the memory of his grandfather telling him that they used to call that stubble “five o’clock shadow.”

I sure have it, he thought. It used to bother me but now I don’t care. In fact it was a real plus when I needed to go undercover. He got up and stretched. It had been another disappointing
day trying to follow the trail of the money Bennett had stolen.

But we will find him, he vowed, we will find him.

But even as he made that promise he wondered if he would be able to keep it. With the Bureau’s focus on terrorism and the number of individuals who had to be watched, resources were
stretched very thin. The previous week an agent who had worked with him on the Bennett case had been reassigned. He did not have the heart to tell Cunningham and the investors that if a break in
the case did not happen soon, more agents who were working with him would be assigned elsewhere.

L
ane made it back from the Bennett town house barely in time to leave with Glady to meet the Countess de la Marco. Her apartment was on the corner
of Fifth Avenue opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The few blocks immediately surrounding the Met were known as Miracle Mile. “Isn’t this considered one of the best addresses in
New York?” Lane asked Glady as they got out of the cab.

“Yes, it is,” Glady agreed. “But the fact is that the most important address in New York is Seven Forty East Seventy-Second Street. I’ve been in the triplex that was
built for John D. Rockefeller there. It would take your breath away. But even more important, it’s furnished tastefully. I couldn’t have done a better job myself. Now, what are you
standing here for? It’s cold. Let’s get inside.”

Countess de la Marco turned out to be a stunning blonde with the figure of a Victoria’s Secret model. “It’s obvious she had a lot of work done,” Glady murmured to Lane
when, after they were invited to sit in the library, the countess excused herself to take a phone call. “She looks thirtyish. I know she’s in her late forties and her hair is loaded
with extensions. When she’s in her sixties, her face will fall apart.”

When the countess returned, she invited them on a tour of the apartment. For the next few minutes she treated them as visiting vendors but then became thoroughly intimidated by Glady. She ended
up meekly agreeing to all of Glady’s pronouncements about how the apartment should be refinished and refurnished.

After the tour they sat at a table in the den as Glady made sketches of the minor architectural changes she proposed to make throughout the apartment. At four o’clock Lane began to take
stealthy glances at her watch. This could go on forever, she thought, and I have to be home by five thirty.

That was the time her wonderful babysitter, Bettina, insisted she had to leave. Finally, at twenty after four Glady stood up from the table. “I think that’s enough for today,”
she said abruptly. “But let me assure you, Countess, that when I am finished you will have one of the most beautiful residences in New York.”

“And to think that only six months before he died, my husband had the foresight to listen to me and withdraw his money from the Bennett Fund,” the countess said unexpectedly.
“If he had not, I assure you that I would not be redecorating this apartment.”

Lane and Glady stared at her. “I didn’t know you were involved in that fund,” Glady said quietly.

“Oh, we were just two of the many,” the countess said. As she spoke her brown eyes widened and her voice lost its modulated tone. “He had a dinner party for ten of us who were
heavily invested with him. He toasted his wife. He couldn’t have been more flowery in the way he spoke of her. But later I happened to pass the library on my way to the restroom. The door was
open. He was on the phone. It was obvious that he was talking to a woman. He was telling her that before too long she would have everything she ever wanted. That was when I felt that if he could
cheat on his wife after speaking so convincingly about how he cherished her, he might also be cheating in other ways.”

“Did you tell the FBI about that conversation?” Lane asked.

“I did, but I got the impression that they knew he had had a lot of girlfriends over the years and whoever this one was, she was just one of many to whom he made lavish
promises.”

Lane knew there was a question she had to ask. “Do you think his son, Eric, was involved in the scam?”

Countess Sylvie remembered to speak in her carefully cultivated voice. “I haven’t got the faintest idea,” she sighed.

At four thirty, on the way down in the elevator, Lane asked, “Glady, something doesn’t ring true to me. Do you think Parker Bennett would be so careless that he’d let someone
overhear that kind of conversation?”

“Of course he didn’t,” Glady snapped. “The rumor always has been that Sylvie de la Marco, nee Sally Chico from Staten Island, was one of Bennett’s girlfriends. This
is her way of keeping the spotlight off herself. Who knows? Bennett may have given her a hot tip to get out of the fund while the getting was good.”

A
s usual Katie was waiting at the door for Lane when she got home at ten after five. “Mommy! Mommy!”

Lane scooped her up and hugged her. “Who loves you?” she demanded.

Katie giggled. “You do.”

“And who will love you forever and ever?”

“You will.”

Lane ran her fingers through Katie’s long golden-red hair. She got the hair from my genes, she thought. But those brilliant blue eyes are Ken’s gift to her. As soon as she set her
down, Katie tugged her by the hand. “I drew a new picture in school today,” she announced proudly.

She had laid it out on the coffee table. Lane had expected to see a picture of one of the animals Katie loved to draw, but this one was different. It bore a remarkable resemblance to Lane in the
jacket and scarf and slacks she had been wearing when they went to the Central Park Zoo last Saturday.

There was no question Katie had an extraordinary talent for drawing. Even the crayons she used vividly captured the colors Lane had been wearing that day.

Lane felt a lump form in her throat. As she showered praise on Katie, she could only think of how gifted an artist Ken had been; she almost said, “You sure are Daddy’s girl,”
and then stopped herself. Be careful, she thought. As she gets older, she’ll understand how talented he was.