Altar of Bones (23 page)

“T
HE ALTAR OF
bones,” Zoe said out loud, and she shuddered as if she were looking down into an open grave. Her grandmother had died with those words on her lips.

She shivered again as she got up quickly and went to the window. Inspector Mackey was gone, but the patrol car was here now. A uniformed cop stood next to it, talking into his shoulder radio.

She read over her grandmother’s letter again. The altar of bones, becoming the next Keeper, a secret pathway and riddles to unlock—it should seem silly, like something out of a Russian folktale, yet her grandmother was dead, murdered.

The ponytailed man. He was close by still, Zoe could feel him, and her throat burned as if the chain were still wrapped around her neck, choking her.

She looked around at the shambles he’d made of her loft. Surely he hadn’t expected to find an altar made out of bones in here? But maybe it
wasn’t really an altar, or maybe it was an altar but it wasn’t really made out of bones.

The riddle was making her head hurt. Whatever the altar of bones was, the ponytailed man had killed her grandmother trying to get his hands on it.

Well, to hell with him. Zoe wasn’t going to allow her grandmother to have died in vain. If Katya Orlova wanted her granddaughter to be the next Keeper, then her granddaughter would do whatever it took to become just that, even though she had no earthly idea at this point what it even meant, let alone what it would entail, beyond—

Look to the Lady …
She took out the postcard of the lady and the unicorn to study it again.

“Beyond a trip to the Musée de Cluny,” she said to Barney, who was pawing through the mess on the floor for more cream cheese.

She took another quick glance out the window—the patrol car was still there, but the cop was gone. He must be on his way up. She would have to hurry.

She looked for her jewelry box and finally discovered it dumped upside down in her bathtub. She sorted through the tangle, looking for a sturdy chain, and found a silver one that would work. She threaded the chain through the key, then fastened it around her neck and hid it beneath her sweater.

A fist pounded on the door. “Ms. Dmitroff?”

“Just a minute,” she called out. “I’m not quite dressed yet.”

“Sorry, ma’am. I’ll, uh, be right out here in the hall.”

She tucked the postcard and her grandmother’s letter into a zippered compartment inside her satchel. Then went quickly to her rolltop desk and opened the secret cubbyhole. Her passport was still there, thank God. She put it into her bag as well, then checked her wallet: $85 in cash, plenty for a cab to the airport. If she couldn’t get a direct flight to Paris tonight, she would try to go through Chicago or New York, or even Atlanta. Once she landed, she could get euros from an ATM.

She would text Gretchen, her paralegal, while she was in the cab, have her apply for a continuance on the one court case she had scheduled
for next week. She also needed to file an amicus brief on behalf of a custody case, but Gretchen could deal with that, too.

Zoe felt a sudden pang at the thought of her grandmother lying in that white plastic body bag in the morgue’s refrigerator. She didn’t want her to be buried as an indigent, and she didn’t trust Anna Larina to care enough to make the proper arrangements. Maybe she could get Gretchen to at least start the paperwork for her if she didn’t get back from Paris in time.

Another knock on the door, gentler this time. “Uh, ma’am? How you doing?”

“Coming …”

She grabbed up fresh underwear, socks and panties and bra, stuffed them in her satchel. She really would’ve loved to shower and change. The clothes she had on, black jeans and black cashmere turtleneck, had been through hell today. But there was no time.

She got Barney and Bitsy in their carriers—they were cooperative for once. Then she unbarred and opened the door.

She gave the young, fresh-faced man who stood on the other side of it her brightest smile. “My poor cats are so terrified I thought I’d leave them with a neighbor while I was gone. I’ll only be minute. If you could maybe wait here by the door, keep an eye on things?”

M
ARIA
S
ANCHEZ PRACTICALLY
had her door open before Zoe could knock.

“Are you sure you’re not in trouble, Zoe? All these cops here tonight, coming and going—”

“Could you take care of the critters for me?” Zoe said, the words tumbling out in a breathless rush. “I have to go out of town for a few days.”

“Of course. Anything. You know I would die for you.”

She said it as if she meant it, and it didn’t sound silly or melodramatic. Besides, Zoe trusted her with her babies, and that was pretty much the same thing.

They hugged, then Zoe said, “Thank you, Maria. And don’t worry,
I’m going to be fine. In a few minutes a nice young patrolman is going to be down here asking you where I’ve run off to—”

“So don’t tell me. It will be better that way.”

Outside, the elevator clanged into motion, going up. Maria made shooing motions with her hands. “Go, go. Call and let me know you’re safe.”

Zoe would call. She thought it might be a while, though, before she was safe.

New York City

A
FIRE ROARED
in the library of Miles Taylor’s four-story Upper East

Side brownstone, but it wasn’t helping the cold he felt in his bones. He sat in his favorite tufted leather chair, nursing a glass of whiskey. A Laphroaig this time, not the sixty-year-old Macallan. The Macallan was only for celebrating the good times, and this was not a good time.

The cell phone in his pocket vibrated, and he jumped as if he’d just been goosed. Damn things. He couldn’t decide whether he loved them or hated them.

He fumbled around with the phone for a moment, trying to remember which button on this model he was supposed to push, then he barked, “Taylor, here,” a little too loudly.

“Hey, lover boy,” Yasmine said in his ear. She sounded breathless, and more than a little crazy. The kind of crazy she got right before or just after she killed someone. “We’ve found Katya Orlova.”

“About goddamn time.” It had been a year and a half since Mike O’Malley had breathed his last, and since then an army of investigators had been scouring the world over for the woman, with not even a nibble. Until now.

“Yes, well, don’t pop the champagne just yet,” Yasmine said. “Because there’s good news and there’s bad news.”

“You know how I hate it when people do that. What’s the bad news?”

“Not over the phone. Where are you—at home? I got a call to make. I need to nail down a couple of things, then I’ll be there in …” There was a pause, and he imagined her checking her watch. It would be the
$100,000 Patek Philippe he’d given her for Christmas. “An hour,” she said, and hung up.

Miles folded up the phone and dropped it back into his pocket. He wanted to get up and pace the room, but his knee already ached like the devil and he didn’t want to pop any more pain pills. And, besides, he suddenly felt drained, limp. Good news and bad news. Why did it always seem that the bad news was more bad than the good news was good?

Yaz said they’d found the woman. So what was the bad news—that she didn’t have the film anymore? Or maybe Mike O’Malley had been lying on his deathbed? Miles wouldn’t put it past the son of a bitch. Maybe she never had the film in the first place. But if she never had it, and O’Malley never had it, then who did?

Dammit, this was making him nuts.

He started at a knock on the library door, spilling whiskey into his lap. He half stood, hoping it was Yasmine, even though it was too soon.

It was his butler instead, bearing a magazine on a silver tray. “I believe you were expecting this, sir. Next month’s
Vanity Fair
delivered by messenger. Hot off the presses.”

“Thank you, Randolph. Leave it here by the lamp, will you?”

Miles waited until the man left the room before he picked up the magazine. He held it out at arm’s length, squinting because he didn’t have his reading glasses handy. His own face looked back at him, and beneath it, in black boldface type, the subhead
MILES TAYLOR, AMERICA’S KINGMAKER
.

He had to flip through what seemed to be twenty pages of ads before he got to the table of contents and found the page number for the article. There was another picture of him, standing in a wide-legged stance with his arms crossed over his chest. Only this one had been photoshopped, so that it looked as if he were a giant, straddling a miniature stock exchange and Wall Street.

Miles’s eyes scanned the article, not really absorbing it, just a few sentences popping up here and there.

Few people outside of this country’s elitist of the elite have even heard of him. And in this camera- and video-hungry age, he
shuns the media as if we were the proverbial plague. Yet his few friends and many enemies alike all agree he has more money and more power than God. What they don’t say, at least not for the record, is that unlike God, Miles Taylor is not afraid to get his hands dirty in the day-to-day running of the world
.

His first real money—and by real money, I’m talking billions here—was made when he was only thirty. When he shorted $500 million worth of Thai bahts, profiting from Bangkok Bank’s reluctance to either raise interest rates or float their currency. At the time a reporter asked if it bothered him that whole companies had gone under and people’s life savings were wiped out in an instant. That because of him, little old mama-sans had been thrown out on the street and were now living off dog food
.

His infamous reply was “Yeah? Well, fuck ‘em.”

A certain haughtiness creeps into his voice when he talks to you about politics. He blames the world’s economic inequalities on market fundamentalism, and he talks about how we need a strong central, international government to correct for the excesses of self-interest, and you find yourself agreeing with him, thinking: Yeah, yeah, ain’t that the truth. But you’re also hating him too, for his utter, self-righteous conviction that only he is right about these things
.

Miles Taylor is a kingmaker in Webster’s sense of the word: he has the utmost influence over the choice of candidates for political office. If anyone can make a president in this country—if any one man can own a president—it is he
.

M
ILES WAS THINKING
it wasn’t bad, was kind of liking it actually, when a paragraph toward the end caught his eye:

One has to wonder, though, at the hubris of a man convinced he can save the world, when he could not save his only son from
ending up a near parody of the spoiled rich kid who had it all and was destroyed by it. Jonathan Taylor died in a crack house at the age of 22 after injecting an eight ball of heroin into his veins. Suicide or accident?

M
ILES SLAMMED THE
magazine closed. He started to throw it into the fire, then dropped it on the floor instead. He nudged it under the chair with his foot, as if out of sight was out of mind. Well, who read Vanity Fair anyway? These days if it wasn’t on YouTube, it was as if it never happened.

Accident or suicide—what difference did it make? He’d tried it all with that boy: counseling, rehab, begging and pleading, even bribery. Only as a last resort did he do the tough-love thing, cutting off all the money, cutting off the sugar tit. Had they put that in the article?

It had been a snowy night like this one. Him in this very chair; Jonathan, white and shaking, pacing the rug in front of the fire. Begging for money. “Just a twenty. Just to get a burger and a coke, I swear. Come on, Dad, you could use twenties for toilet paper and it wouldn’t make a dent in all you’ve got.”

And Miles saying, “I don’t know which of us is more pathetic. You for being stupid enough to think I’d fall for your bullshit, or me for listening to it.”

Then Jonathan, whirling away from the fire to face him, and Miles seeing his boy, really seeing him for the first time, and realizing that the shine he was seeing in his son’s eyes wasn’t from tears. It was hate. Pure, unadulterated hate.