The Rich and the Dead (32 page)

Then Lila's heart jumped; she saw who the Facilitator was sending his surveillance reports to: [email protected] She looked at the e-mails again. Effie had been carrying on the correspondence with an unidentified spy under the name Camilla Dayton.

Lila then looked deeper into the files and was shocked to discover that numerous flight itineraries had been booked under the name Camilla Dayton. The first flight was taken on October 10 to Costa Rica, just a few days after Effie had invited Lila to stay with her at the guesthouse. Not only had Effie lied about the destination of every trip she'd taken since Lila moved in, but it appeared as if she'd been carrying out an elaborate scheme to set Lila up. But why? Was Effie planning on framing Lila for the Star Island murders?

Lila knew what she had to do next. She had to shadow Effie in order to uncover the identities of the Facilitator and the Target.

Lila unearthed the black wig she'd used to impersonate her old self on Thanksgiving night at the police station. She rented a nondescript car that she parked at a construction site a few doors down. And then Lila trailed Effie around the streets of Miami.

After four exhausting days of tailing Effie as she went from the Delano to the Soho Beach House to Club Deuce to the shops of Bal Harbour and every Ocean Drive hot spot in between, Lila was losing patience. She now had only a little more than a week before the Star Island killer would strike, and she didn't want to waste it watching Effie pick out shoes.

Finally, on the fifth day, Christmas Eve, she caught a break. Lila was watching as Effie tried on sunglasses at Barneys when Effie got a text that sent her hustling out of the department store and into her car. Lila followed, two cars behind. Effie drove south on Collins, across the MacArthur Causeway, then north on Bayshore. Lila watched as she pulled her car over at a small park, got out, and removed a shopping bag from her trunk. Lila drove past and pulled her car over a few hundred feet ahead, keeping her eye on Effie through the rearview mirror.

Apart from Effie and four retirees practicing tai chi, the park was empty, making it hard for Lila to stay close without being detected. Effie was visibly nervous, and seemed acutely aware of every inch of her surroundings. She was constantly swiveling her head, like a mouse searching for a hawk.

As Effie walked toward the water, a man stepped out from behind a tree and approached her. Lila quickly sat on a bench about thirty feet from where, she assumed, “Camilla” was meeting with the Facilitator.

Wearing a motorcycle jacket and jeans, the man was wiry and bald, and he walked with the rigid posture that comes only from years of military training. From where Lila sat, it looked like he had scarred skin and tattooed eyebrows. Effie handed the shopping bag over to the Facilitator, and then the meeting was over.

Effie spun around and, with her head down, walked back toward her car, right past Lila, who shielded her face with her hand as if to block out the sun. The moment Effie passed, Lila jumped up and set off to follow the bald man.

Holding the bag, he walked along the water toward the Grand, a monolith of a hotel that rose high up into the sky. Lila followed. But she must have been getting too close because, in an instant, the man began running. Making a split-second choice between maintaining her cover and pursuing her suspect, Lila took off after him.

The man, clutching the bag under his arm like a running back cradling a football, made a sharp right up the Grand's staircase and entered the hotel lobby with Lila in hot pursuit. But when she entered the cavernous lobby, all traces of him had disappeared. Weaving among the meandering tourists, Lila searched to no avail. Her heart was racing, and drops of sweat were streaming down her face from the itchy heat of the wig atop her head.

Lila stood by the revolving doors that led out to the main street, trying to catch her breath and hoping to pick up the scent of the Facilitator. Five minutes later, she knew the trace had gone cold. She exited the building, planning to sweep its perimeter, when she suddenly spotted him across the street, walking toward a red Pontiac. When he saw that he'd been found, his lips curled into a murderous scowl. He jumped in the car and tore out onto the road. There was no chance of catching him. But through the smoke of burned rubber left from his tires, Lila had been able to identify the license plate. Relief washed over her.

That was all the information she needed to hunt him down.

I
T WAS ONE
in the morning on Christmas Day when Lila, still wearing her wig, walked back into the Miami police station. Just as he had been on Thanksgiving night, Kreps was dozing off behind the front desk, his chin on his uniformed chest. Lila tried to pass by into the back office undetected, but Kreps snorted awake. In thirty years on the force, not much had gotten past him.

“Back so soon?” he asked. “Thought you went home for the night.”

“I forgot something at my desk,” Lila replied. “Just gotta go and grab it.”

“Sure, and while you're getting that, why don't you also get yourself a life?”

“Good one, Kreps,” Lila said, smiling despite herself. With a little bit of distance, even Kreps's corny jokes and grumpy demeanor made her nostalgic for her old life.

Lila walked through the desolate halls to her empty desk, flicked on the lights, and sat down. She logged in to her computer and opened up the Department of Motor Vehicles database.

Lila discovered that the Facilitator was driving a car registered to Esther Johnson, age eighty-six, of Ambrose, Georgia. This didn't surprise Lila. No criminal worth his weight would drive a car that was registered under his own name. More typically, either the license plates were stolen or the vehicle was registered to a relative. Seeing that neither the vehicle nor the plates were listed as missing, Lila hoped that she could make a connection between Esther Johnson and the man with the tattooed eyebrows.

After a few hours searching IRS records, Lila was able to compile a list of dependents the old woman in Georgia had claimed, long ago, on her tax returns. From there, Lila could find the children of those dependents. Then she cross-checked the names of Esther's sons and grandsons—there were eight of them between ages fifteen and sixty-three—with the Veterans' Service Records, because she would bet her life that this guy was ex-military. That was when she hit the jackpot. She found him. His military photo showed a much younger man, with hair and eyebrows intact, skin unscarred, but it was definitely him.

He was Shane Johnson, age forty-seven, and from what Lila could dig up, he'd had his thumb in almost every nasty black ops plot that the government perpetrated, from running guns to the Contras when he was in his teens to supervising soldiers at Abu Ghraib. He was granted an honorable discharge in 2008 after sustaining second-degree burns on his face and torso from a roadside IED while in Baghdad. Most likely, that was what had left him bald and without eyebrows.

After he left the military, the trail went fairly dark. In 2010, he was picked up for assault in New Orleans, but the charges were later dropped. According to his tax returns, from 2010 until 2013, Johnson was an employee of Xe Services, the army of mercenaries known to supplement U.S. military operations.

The only possible reason Effie would have to get mixed up with a man as shady as Shane Johnson was if she needed a murderer for hire. Had the transaction at the park today been Effie giving Shane money to carry out the Star Island murders? But, if that was the case, how did Effie end up dead? Maybe the deal Effie had made with this killer would somehow go sour. Or was someone else paying him, too?

Johnson had one credit card that he used regularly. Pulling up those records, Lila noticed that there were frequent charges made to a bar in Little Haiti. She knew the place—a dive familiar to any cop who worked that beat. It was too late to go there tonight, but she'd stake the place out tomorrow.

O
N
C
HRISTMAS NIGHT
, Lila drove by Shane Johnson's local bar. Sure enough, he was there, sitting at the bar by himself. He had seen her as Lila Day, and though she was back to looking like Camilla Dayton, she didn't dare go inside. Instead, she sat watching him from her idling car for three hours until he stumbled out into the night. She got out of her car and followed him, careful to keep a conservative distance though she suspected he was too drunk to notice her.

He walked west for three blocks until he arrived at a small run-down bungalow on a trash-strewn block: Northeast Sixty-Fourth Street. The red Pontiac was parked outside.

“I see you,” Lila said softly as he unbolted his front door. “I've got you now.”

CHAPTER 35

I
T WAS THE
day after Christmas. There were seven days left until the Star Island massacre would take place. After so many dead ends, Lila 's case had momentum. Shane Johnson must have been hired by Effie to assassinate her fellow society members. Lila still hadn't figured out Effie's motive, or what would go wrong, but she knew she would continue to wait and watch and build her case. Just not today. Today, something else was taking priority.

Dylan.

On this day, Dylan Rhodes would be shot in front of a convenience store on Lenox Avenue around 2:00
P
.
M
. But Lila had decided that this was not going to happen, consequences be damned. She was going to save the man she loved.

She was surprised by her own conviction. Once she'd made up her mind, no other choice seemed possible.

Stopping the shooting wouldn't be all that difficult. She just needed to make sure she was with Dylan all day, and never let him get near the corner where his life would be forever altered by one terrible moment.

At first, when she'd suggested they spend this day together, Dylan had objected. But she refused to take no for an answer. Finally, they agreed that he would pick her up in the morning and they'd go to the Sunset Harbor Yacht Club, where Dylan kept his boat. They'd spend the entire day sailing down to Boca Chita and back.

She'd be with him. She'd keep him safe.

At 10:30, Dylan pulled up in his silver Mercedes. The main house was empty. Effie had left the day before for New York, to spend Christmas with her father and his family. Or at least that's what she had told Lila, who needed to continually remind herself not to believe one word Effie said.

Lila ran out to greet Dylan, holding a small, cheerfully wrapped package. He got out of the car and swept her up in his arms. He held her close for a very long time, as if they'd been apart for months and not a week.

When she pulled away from his embrace, she saw his face was shadowed with worry.

“Everything okay?” she asked. Silently, he nodded yes, but his grim expression went unchanged.

Lila was anxious to get Dylan away from the streets of Miami. Never before had she been so eager to get out on the ocean.

They drove, top down, across the causeway, then north up Alton Road. Lila tried to get Dylan to talk, but he seemed uncharacteristically quiet. She hoped he wasn't upset with her about anything.

When Dylan turned right on Sixteenth Street, and then made a left on Lenox, Lila began to panic. This was the street where, if fate had its way, he would be shot.

“Where are we going?” she asked, her voice shrill with nervousness.

“There's a liquor store up here at the corner. I just want to grab some champagne for us, for the boat ride.”

“No!” Lila shouted. “I mean, we don't need any, it's fine, let's just go.” She was babbling and she knew it, but she couldn't help it.

Dylan looked at her with concern. “I'll just be a minute.”

He pulled the car over at the corner of Lenox and Seventeenth Street. Lila looked at the clock. It was 11:18
A
.
M
., a little less than three hours before the shooting would take place. Someone else would be shot today, she tried to tell herself. The culprit wasn't anywhere near here yet. But still, deep in her gut, she had a feeling that this was all wrong.