The Finishing School (36 page)

“Yeah, I understand. Hey, you haven’t seen Dan, have you? I can’t find him, and he’s not answering his pager.”

“No, but if I see him, I’ll tell him to meet us there, too.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be down in two minutes,” Melanie said, and closed the door.

She turned back to Dan. “Did you hear that? Can you believe it? We have to
do
something!”

He walked over to her and looked down at her indulgently. “It’ll be okay, I promise.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child,” she said, looking up at him with blazing eyes. “It’ll be okay if we make it okay.”

He stepped back. “You’re right. So let’s move. You call New York and have the lieutenant get us some reinforcements to cover the hand-to-hand tonight. I’ll take Bridget and go scout out the location. Now, this is just a
suggestion
, missy, so don’t get all bent out of shape that I’m telling you what to do. But it would make sense for you to stay put and coordinate things. At least for now.”

She sighed. “You’re right. I agree.”

“You
do
?”

They locked eyes. She couldn’t help thinking about what they’d been doing a few minutes earlier. She could tell he was thinking about the same thing.

“Yeah,” she said, with a smile and a toss of her head. “But don’t get used to it.”

PATRICIA MADE IT home through the falling snow just in time to receive Coco and Vuitton, who were being dropped off at six with the doorman by the dog groomer’s limo. Patricia was bringing both doggies to the benefit tomorrow, so they’d had shampoos, blow-dries, pedicures. And their new leashes were ready—matching his and hers from Gucci. Her doggies were just as well groomed as anybody’s, and they’d be even more so soon enough, because Patricia would be Mrs. Seward and
that
rich. At least she still held out hope, though she had to admit that things were not going according to plan.

The limo pulled up to the curb just as Patricia arrived, and the uniformed driver got out and demanded to see identification before turning the pooches over to her. Patricia appreciated the security. You couldn’t be too careful. Coco and Vuitton were such perfect miniature Yorkies, so very petite and delicate, who
wouldn’t
covet them? Satisfied, the driver released them to her care. Patricia scooped up her babies and kissed them passionately, which did little to relieve the anxiety rising in her throat.

It was not the benefit that worried her. All arrangements had been completed months earlier by a committee of mothers whose party-planning skills were beyond question. These women dominated every museum board in town, and for good reason. They had personal relationships with the best caterers, florists, auctioneers, bandleaders. The theme this year was Christmas in the Alps. Every facet of the evening had been meticulously crafted to fit, down to the authentic lederhosen on the gorgeous young waitstaff and truckloads of evergreen boughs lit with tiny electric candles that looked uncannily real.

The benefit would begin with a live auction held in Holbrooke’s auditorium, where everything from the trendiest ski togs to time-shares in Gstaad would go on the block, called by a prominent auctioneer from Sotheby’s. Then Patricia would get up and read the names of the donors in Miss Holbrooke’s Inner Circle, which was reserved for those who’d given in excess of two hundred fifty thousand dollars to the endowment campaign. Then the main event—and this one Patricia would’ve resisted if she hadn’t feared looking suspicious. Roger and Enid Van Allen would ascend to the stage at precisely seven-thirty, their bankers on standby. In a dramatic live-action PowerPoint presentation projected for the audience’s entertainment, they would transfer ten million dollars into Holbrooke’s account. Patricia would then unveil the architect’s drawing of the new Van Allen Upper School Building.

After the show was over, guests would be ferried by a squadron of horse-drawn carriages hired for the occasion to the grand ballroom of a nearby hotel for a banquet featuring beluga caviar, squab, rack of lamb, and raspberries sabayon paired with appropriate wines and champagnes, followed by dancing and the distribution of lavish Burberry gift bags containing goodies worth hundreds of dollars, provided free of charge by merchants looking to score points with the Holbrooke parent body.

Her own preparations for the big event would take Patricia most of tomorrow. A final fitting of the dress with her tailor scheduled for first thing, followed by facial, manicure, pedicure, retouching of highlights, blow-dry, and makeup at Elizabeth Arden. She should be finished by four. All the financial details had been attended to. The Van Allens’ bank had the requisite codes and account information, and Holbrooke’s bankers stood ready as well. Patricia was not at all concerned about the money’s getting wired
in
. No. That wasn’t the problem.

What troubled her, what had her positively
beside
herself, was how in hell to get the money
out
. The whole scheme had been months, years even, in the planning, and now a key element had gone and failed on her. Had up and, actually, disappeared. Which made her desperately afraid that there was some unknown wrench in the works. The safeguard made so much sense at the time she put it in place. She didn’t want her own fingerprints—literally speaking—on the account. Of course not, that would be foolish. She didn’t expect that the skimming would ever be discovered, but if it were, she needed deniability. She needed a scapegoat, a fall guy. So naturally she chose somebody she believed she could easily manipulate. Carmen Reyes.

Patricia poured herself a scotch and sighed deeply, walking over to look out her window, thirty-three stories above street level. The evening sky was a luminous gray with black clouds like thumbprints scudding across it. Powdery flakes blew sideways in the wind, obscuring the midtown skyline in a cottony veil. She understood there was no way around this problem. If Carmen didn’t turn up by tomorrow, Patricia would simply have to tell James the scheme was off. But not before she asked him where he’d been on Monday night when his daughter died. Because, despite what that prosecutor seemed to think, he hadn’t been with
her
.

MELANIE WAS CLIMBING the walls. She’d been sitting on her butt in the hotel room, supposedly waiting to play switchboard operator, but since the rest of the team was incommunicado, they hadn’t required her services. Dan and Bridget had driven off to El Yunque hours ago with five enormous local cops in mirrored shades and flashy uniforms. By now they should have taken up position around El Baño Grande, a decrepit and overgrown stone swimming pool in El Yunque park where the drug deal was supposed to go down in two hours. They were maintaining radio silence, so Melanie couldn’t exactly call for an update. Nor could she reach Lieutenant Albano or Ray-Ray Wong, who presumably were on a plane to San Juan tailing Trevor Leonard. At least she
hoped
that’s where they were. Trevor’s safety was her greatest worry right now, and there’d been no news on him since she’d first learned he’d dropped from view.

She decided to check her office voice mail back home in order to have something productive to do.

“
You have
two
new messages
.”

The first was left at 1:47 P.M. — Shavonne Washington from the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office.

“
Hey, Melanie, we just got the results on that comprehensive tox screen you requested, and they’re pretty interesting. Brianna Meyers’s came out like you’d expect, just heroin. But Whitney’s tox had a little added bonus. Lethal levels of not only heroin but OxyContin—repeat, OxyContin. Oxy’s a powerful prescription painkiller. People
do
use it recreationally and overdose accidentally. But you should also know it’s the drug of choice for murders made to look like ODs. Whitney had about twenty times the therapeutic dosage in her blood. To get levels that high, you’d have to cook the Oxy and heroin together and shoot up the cocktail, but still, you woulda had to make one
huge
wrongheaded mistake on the dosage. If you recall, the doc found fresh tracks between her toes, so that looks good for point of entry. But like you said, where’s the syringe? This is all starting to smell kinda funky, you ask me
.”

Whitney Seward had been murdered, and somebody had gone to great lengths to make it look like an accidental overdose. Melanie and Dan had suspected this from day one; now there was official confirmation. The obvious explanation was that Esposito had done it, of course. Maybe Whitney had become a liability somehow. Maybe she’d threatened to go to the police, tried to blackmail him. A guy like Esposito hardly needed an excuse to order a hit. But, tempting as it might be to bow to the obvious, that theory just didn’t sit right with Melanie. If Esposito
had
been responsible, he’d want to keep his name out of it. So why fake an OD using Golpe packets that would lead the cops right back to his operation? Why erase all the numbers but his own from Whitney’s cell phone?

Melanie was already thinking “frame-up.” Then she listened to the next message, and became a hundred percent convinced.

The message had been left on her office voice mail at 7:20 P.M., which, adjusting for the time difference, was less than an hour ago. “
Um, hi, it’s Lulu. Look, I said I told you everything I know, but that wasn’t true. Carmen was real upset about something going down in the school office at Holbrooke that didn’t have nothing to do with Jay Esposito. The Esposito thing…well, somebody made me say that, okay? I can explain. Please call me, because I’m real scared and I need to talk to you
.”

The school office at Holbrooke? Melanie didn’t know what to make of that one. She listened to that message three times through to get a clearer understanding, and the major thing she came away with was that somebody was out to frame Jay Esposito. Lulu Reyes had been ordered by an unknown individual to implicate him in Carmen’s disappearance.
Falsely
. That could mean Expo didn’t have Carmen. Beyond that, it could mean he wasn’t responsible for the deaths of Whitney Seward and Brianna Meyers either. So what did that say about the entire direction of their investigation? Or even about this drug deal tonight? Was the hand-to-hand in El Yunque for real but just unrelated to Whitney and Brianna’s deaths? Or was the drug deal orchestrated by the true killer, an elaborate ploy intended to throw off the cops? A hoax, a diversion—God forbid, an
ambush
?

Melanie dialed the Reyeses’ apartment with shaking hands, thinking of Dan out in the rain forest. Was he walking into a trap?

Luis Reyes answered. Melanie immediately told him she had no news about Carmen, in order not to get his hopes up, but said she needed to speak to Lulu right away.

“She not here right now. She got ice-skating practice in Chelsea Piers till ten o’clock tonight. I think it’s good she keep up her routine, you know?”

He gave Melanie the number for the Chelsea Piers Sky Rink. She called there right away, but the woman who answered the phone refused to get Lulu off the ice, claiming she was too busy to leave her station. Melanie insisted it was an emergency. The woman grudgingly took a message, but Melanie had zero confidence Lulu would ever see it.
Damn
.

Melanie paced like a caged animal, agonizing over her next step. She
wanted
to go find Dan in the rain forest and warn him the drug deal might be some kind of hoax. That’s what she
wanted
to do, but she kept telling herself it wasn’t smart. She was a prosecutor, not a cop. She could screw things up, barging into the middle of a surveillance. Not to mention get hurt.

The phone shrieked, and Melanie jumped. She grabbed the receiver, hoping it was Lulu calling back.

“He-hello?”

“Yo, Ms. Vargas, Frank Leary, Manhattan South Homicide, calling to give youse a heads-up on developments with this Deon Green murder.”

“Oh, sure, Detective,” she said, struggling to focus her brain on something other than what was happening in El Yunque.

“We locked up the pross in question earlier today. One Samir Khan, aka Sammy. Guy rolled right away. Claims he was paid off to lure the vic into a beatin’ by none other than your boy Jay Esposito.”

“Huh. Really.” Melanie fell silent. The thought that Fabulous Deon had thus in all likelihood been killed for snitching made her sick to her stomach. But another part of her experienced a guilty jolt of relief. If Expo were responsible after all, then Dan was just surveilling a normal drug deal. Nothing to worry about.

“Hello?” Leary asked after a moment.

“Yes, I’m still here,” she said. “I hate to hear that. It means Fabulous Deon was probably murdered in retaliation for his work with us.”

“Jeez, sorry about that.”

“God, that’s just awful. Deon was a good man.”

“So let’s move fast on this Esposito asshole, make him pay.”

“Yes, definitely. Our team’s set up right now at a location about forty-five minutes from here, where Expo’s people are doing a hand-to-hand tonight. We’re expecting him to show up there.”

“Expo? In Puerto Rico? No way. He’s in New York tonight. I got good intelligence says he’s at one of his clubs.”

“Are you sure? That’s different from what we’ve been hearing.”

“The snitch I’m working with is real reliable, so I’m pretty confident. My partner and I are gonna take a ride right now and bring ’im in.”

“Detective, do me a favor and let me know as soon as you’ve got Esposito in custody? If he’s not down here, we need to know.”

“Sure thing.”

Esposito at one of his clubs in New York? What could that mean, other than that she’d been right? Somebody was playing them. They were being set up. Jesus, she’d better warn Dan. But he had his phone and his radio turned off.

Melanie desperately started dialing team members, even though she assumed nobody would answer. She left messages on Dan’s and Bridget’s cells begging them to call her at the hotel because she had important new information. Then she called Ray-Ray Wong. Much to her shock, he picked up on the first ring.