Annie Seymour 01-Sacred Cows (29 page)

Because Albert was still out there and I could still be in danger. She didn’t have to spell it out for me. But thinking about the cop, I wondered where Tom was.

And thinking about Tom made me realize I didn’t want to be alone. After Paula left, I locked the deadbolt and put the chain on the door, turning off the bright overhead light and keeping on the smaller lamp on the end table. I was almost done with the brandy and was about to get a refill when the buzzer made me jump about fifteen feet.

I glanced out the window and saw a familiar figure on the stoop. I pushed the button to let him in and was just unlocking the door when he got to the landing.

“Jesus, you look like hell,” Vinny said when he walked in.

“Nice to see you, too,” I growled. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, you don’t get to stay.” Despite my tone, he must have seen how relieved I was to see him.

Vinny put his fingers under my chin and lifted my face toward him. “You okay?” he asked softly.

I didn’t want to do it, but the tears spilled down my cheeks before I could stop them, and he pulled me to him, his arms around me. I felt his lips on my hair, and I lifted my face to kiss him. To hell with Rosie.

We stood like that for what seemed like forever but was probably only about five minutes. I struggled to stop the tears and finally stepped back, keeping him at arm’s length. “No,” I said, “I’m fine now, I really am.” But I wasn’t completely sure about that.

“What happened out there?”

“Nicholas Curtin ambushed me while I was watching Sarah and David Best’s roommate have a fight. He had a knife, I crashed my mom’s car into the cow. End of story.” The waterworks were going to start again if I wasn’t careful. I took another drink of brandy, hoping the booze would keep me in line.

“Sarah?”

“Melissa Peabody’s roommate, Sarah Lewis.”

“She was here?”

I shrugged, not sure where he was going with this. “She was near Wooster Street. They were fighting.” I paused. “You know, I think they were the two who mugged me that night.”

Vinny was nodding. “They might have been.”

I had started heading for the kitchen for another refill, but I stopped and stared at him. “Really?”

“Yeah.” Vinny ran a hand through his hair, and the shadows under his eyes told me he was tired. “I spent all day on the computer. Following Mark Torrey’s money. At least as far as I could get,” he added.

I waited, uncertain where this was leading.

“What exactly were they fighting about?” he asked.

I struggled to remember. It wasn’t that long ago, but so much had happened to me today that everything was starting to get mixed up. The brandy probably wasn’t helping. “I don’t know, really. But it sounded like she was going somewhere, he said something about what time was her flight.”

Vinny’s eyes grew wide. “A flight? You’re sure?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

He started for the door. “I have to go.”

This was unacceptable. I had been abducted twice in one day. I wasn’t about to be abandoned, too. “Where are you going?”

“You’ll be okay,” he said absently as he opened the door.

I put my arm across the doorway. “If you’re leaving, then I’m coming with you.”

A smile slid across his face, and his eyes twinkled. “Come on, Annie. You must feel like crap.”

“Because I look like crap?” I was aware that my voice was getting louder. Pretty soon those neighbors of mine would complain about the noise. But I didn’t give a shit. I wasn’t going to stay there all by myself, even if there was a cop downstairs. Vinny, for some odd reason, made me feel safe. I didn’t want to lose that feeling right now.

“You can’t come with me,” he said, but I could see he was wavering.

“There’s something about Sarah, isn’t there, that you know,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

Vinny pulled my arm away from the open doorway and gently shut the door, obviously aware that my voice was carrying. “I found a bank account with her name on it,” he said. “There are a lot of bank accounts, Torrey has been shifting the money from one to another until it’s out of sight. Torrey had accounts in Melissa Peabody’s name, too, and Allison Sanders’s, Albert Webber’s, Nicholas Curtin’s, and a couple of others.”

“No shit?”

Vinny nodded. “No shit.”

“So the money he bilked from my mother is gone?”

“Hopefully we can still find it,” he said, but I could see he wasn’t that optimistic.

Something was nagging at me. “But what about Lundgren? He was really pissed when I asked him about that and put it in the story. And my mother said something about how Lundgren might be connected.”

“From what I’ve been able to piece together from the tapes that Hickey made, Torrey embezzled from Lundgren, and they found out about it after he started working for the city. But instead of turning him in, they bribed him by helping him set up McGee with the idea that some of McGee’s money would find its way into their pockets. Lundgren knew what Torrey was capable of and that he’d go the distance. His contacts at City Hall got him in good with the high rollers in the city. He’s a smooth guy, he’s a lawyer, and everyone trusted him, especially after the first year when all the investors made money. Then he started skimming, like he was supposed to.”

“But he didn’t give Lundgren what they wanted, did he?”

Vinny smiled. “Give the girl a gold star.”

“So everyone’s been looking for this guy.” I paused. It was almost too much to take in at once. “He used Sarah’s name on an account, too?” I struggled to remember if Sarah had told me she’d had contact with Torrey, but all I came up with was that she’d talked on the phone to him a couple of times. Maybe it was more than that, though, and suddenly her blush slammed into my brain, the blush she’d had when she was talking about him. Dammit, that was it. Did Mark Torrey fuck every Yalie this month? “Do you think she knows?”

Vinny’s smile turned into a grin. “I think she’s going to meet him. I think she knows where he is.”

I wanted to go with him. Call me crazy, but I wanted to confront her, see if she really was the one who’d mugged me, find out why. And if she did know where Torrey was, well, I wanted to find him, too.

“You have to let me come along,” I said firmly.

“I don’t think so,” Vinny said, his hand on the doorknob again.

“Yes, you do. Because I know where her dorm room is, and you don’t.” I wasn’t exactly sure that he didn’t know, he might have been to her room after Melissa’s body was found, but figured I’d throw that out there and see where it landed.

And to my surprise, he paused. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, you can come.”

I grabbed my bag off the floor and was out the door before he could change his mind. But I hadn’t remembered about the cop downstairs, who scowled at us when we came down. “Where are you going?” he demanded. “You’re supposed to stay here.”

“I don’t remember anyone saying that,” I said.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, flustered, pulling out a cell phone. “I have to call about this.”

I wondered if we shouldn’t tell Paula where we were going, just in case. After my adventures today, I wanted as many people as possible to know my whereabouts. But I could tell from Vinny’s stiff posture that he wouldn’t buy into this plan. He had a vested interest in finding Mark Torrey himself: a big wad of cash at the end of this roller-coaster ride from my mother’s law firm. Having the FBI and the cops involved could only make his job harder. Kind of like the way I felt about Dick Whitfield stepping on my toes.

So I was sympathetic, but torn in my loyalty to my friend, the FBI agent who could kick the bad guy’s ass, and to Vinny, who could also kick his ass while looking damned sexy at the same time.

Like any other woman would, I opted for the guy over my friend. Stupid, yeah, but it could be more interesting in the long run.

“Listen,” I said to the cop, whose name tag labeled him as Morrison, “I’ll call Paula from the road and let her know what’s up. That way you won’t get into trouble.”

And before he could say anything, we were in Vinny’s Ford Explorer and peeling away from the curb in front of my building.

We were halfway to Yale when my phone rang. I checked the number and saw it was Paula. I made a mental note to say something about Morrison to Tom; obviously he wasn’t trustworthy.

“Where the hell are you going?” Paula didn’t even say hello. “And it better be damned good to get me out of the interrogation room.”

I told her quickly about Sarah and what Vinny had found.

“We’re on our way over to her room to see if she’s still there,” I said.

“I’ll call Tweed and Bradley and see if she’s scheduled on any flights,” Paula offered. “If she is, I’ll make sure there’s someone waiting for her to keep her from getting on the plane.”

This was surprisingly easy. There had to be a catch.

“I’ll send someone over to the dorm to meet you,” she added. “This is really stupid of you two to do by yourself.”

“Christ, Paula, she’s a twenty-year-old college student. What the hell could she do to us?”

“Annie,” and I was pretty sure a lecture was coming, but then, “Nicholas Curtin just told us Sarah killed Melissa Peabody.”

CHAPTER 25

Holy shit,” I said softly. “Do you have proof?” “No,” and I could hear the fatigue in her voice. “He wants to cut a deal, so we’re not even sure if it’s true. But just in case, we were about to send someone over to pick her up. If you get there before we do, try to keep her there, but be careful.”

“I’ll call you when we know something,” I said, ready to hang up.

“Wait.”

“Yeah?”

“Something else about Curtin. That knife he held on you, he didn’t cut you, did he?”

“No, he just pricked me a little but didn’t draw any blood. Why?”

“There’s blood in the grooves on the handle.”

She hung up and I stared at the phone in my hand. If anyone had told me what my day would be like, I wouldn’t have believed him. I’m a reporter, which means I usually just watch what goes on, then sit down at my little computer and write about it. That’s the gist of it. I am not the news. I am an observer of the world. Christ, now I sound like Dick Whitfield.

But all of that was before Melissa Peabody’s body was found in the street. Before Mark Torrey decided to rip off my mother and the publisher. Before the cows.

All of those things had set off a chain reaction that somehow was ending up in my lap, with my life hanging in the balance.

For a nanosecond I thought about calling Marty. This was one big fucking story, and that Pulitzer might well be within my reach if I approached it the right way.

But with my luck, someone would say I was lying, like that chick who wrote the story in the
Washington Post
about a heroin-addicted kid, or Jayson Blair, the
New York Times
reporter who made up shit about pretty much everything. Because this was all too weird to actually be happening.

“You okay?” Vinny was asking as we crossed State Street and went up Chapel.

I told him what Paula told me.

“Well, Melissa Peabody wasn’t stabbed, so it isn’t her blood,” Vinny said.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I started, but then I knew. Allison. It could be Allison’s blood on that handle.

And then another thought hit me in the gut like a lead balloon. Allison was killed after I talked to her. Maybe Curtin killed her because he found out she’d talked to me. Christ, I hoped that wasn’t it. I didn’t think I could live with the guilt.

I didn’t have much time to dwell on that at the moment, however, because we were easing into a parking space on High Street. There were no cops in sight yet. We hopped out of the SUV, and I pushed all thoughts about Allison from my head. I needed to be focused on Sarah now.

The gate was propped open. Someone was expecting someone, and I hoped Sarah wasn’t on to us. Vinny and I slipped through the gate and I led the way across the courtyard to Sarah’s dorm. There were lights in every window except one. We stepped into the stairwell and heard a door slam somewhere above us. Vinny grabbed my arm and pulled me into the shadows.

Footsteps bounded down the stairs, and when we saw the figure in the doorway, Vinny and I stepped in front of her.

“What are you doing here?” Sarah looked from me to Vinny, shifting her backpack across her shoulder. If she was surprised to see us, she didn’t show it.

“Going somewhere?” I asked.

“The library,” she said.

“Saw you earlier, with Matt,” I continued. “Had a little altercation with your friend Nick.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Nick. Nick Curtin. He’s the one who killed Allison, did you know that?” Okay, so it wouldn’t hold up in court unless there was more evidence, but she didn’t have to know that right now.

This surprised her. The backpack fell off her shoulder and landed with a thud. I heard something roll across the floor, and I looked down at the small bronze Buddha I’d held in her room.

Vinny was faster than I was. “What’s this?” he asked, picking it up.

Sarah reached for it, but he pulled it away and held it out to his side, inspecting it. “Pretty cool,” Vinny said.

“Just give it back,” Sarah said gruffly. “You know, you really should be talking to Matt.”

“Why?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I didn’t have anything to do with this. It was Matt. It was all his idea.”

“What was his idea?” Vinny was asking as I saw something else on the ground that had fallen out of her backpack.

I picked it up. “Airline ticket? Going somewhere?”

The light was dim, but my eyes aren’t that bad yet, so I could still read it. “Tweed to Philadelphia to Paris?” I turned to Vinny. “Is Mark Torrey in Paris?”

Vinny shrugged.

“This has nothing to do with him,” Sarah said, standing up a little straighter, her voice a little more self-assured. “My parents are there, I’m going for a week.”

“But this is a one-way ticket.” I leafed through the documents. “When are you coming back?”

“She’s not.”

The voice startled us, and Vinny and I turned to see Matt Minneo slumped against the wall.

It was enough of a distraction that Sarah grabbed the Buddha out of Vinny’s hand, pushed me aside, and ran into the courtyard. But Matt was too quick for her, grabbing her around the waist and pulling her back to us.