Jericho's Fall (21 page)

The alarm company.

She started to explain what had happened, but the woman at the other end cut her off and asked for the security code.

Beck asked her to hold on, called Pamela. Pamela listened, then turned away, cupping her hand over the mouthpiece, to repeat the code, even at this moment showcasing her lack of trust in her father’s ex-lover.

“Come on,” said Audrey, grabbing Beck’s arm. “We’re going out there.”

(ii)

Pamela insisted on a backup plan.

Audrey went to tend to the injured man, while her sister stood nearby with a Beretta she had obtained from somewhere. Beck was assigned to stand in the doorway, in case the others had to make a run for the house, ready to press the button to slam the gates closed again as soon as they were safely inside. Beck was surprised that Pamela trusted her this far; as for Audrey, she tried and failed to talk her sister into giving up the gun.

“He’s can’t hurt us,” said Audrey.

“He could have friends,” said Beck—and Pamela agreed.

The man who had fallen from the roof seemed vaguely familiar. He wanted them nowhere near him. He clenched his fist, holding his leg and warning them to stay away as he called them inventively misogynistic names, and promised to sue various parts, mostly private, off their bodies. Audrey kept assuring him, calmly, that she was trained in first aid, and the man told her in detail what she could do with her first aid. Pamela waved the gun in his face and screamed back at him, a move that evidently scared everybody, because the man finally calmed down and let Audrey go to work splinting his leg.

Beck, meanwhile, was remembering where she had seen him before.

The wind picked up again. Dry leaves tumbled across the lawn as Pamela, gun in hand, crouched beside the stranger in the snow. She
whispered something. Audrey argued, and Pamela shouldered her aside. The man shook his head. The gun came up. He started shouting. The gun pointed between his legs. He went very quiet. Pamela whispered. He nodded. She whispered again, the gun closer. Trembling, he whispered back. She stood up, his wallet in her hand.

Audrey went back to work, and Pamela strode over to Beck. “His ID says he’s a private investigator. He says some magazine hired him to get a couple of shots of Dad on his deathbed. Fifty thousand, cash on the nail.” She was trembling with fury. She held up a camera. “No way he’s getting this back. Not for fifty thousand, not for a hundred. On his
deathbed
.”

Beck was trying to come up with a suitable response when the gendarmes arrived, two cruisers and an ambulance.

Two deputies guarded the prisoner while the paramedics tended to him. Another talked to the sisters. Emboldened now that Pamela could do him no harm, the man was once more thundering threats of litigation. Sheriff Garvey lumbered over to Rebecca.

“Quite a character,” he said.

“Pamela says he’s a private investigator.”

He nodded. “Name of Pesky. One of the punks my deputy arrested last night. This morning I kicked his ass over the county line, and here he is back for another round.”

Beck remembered now, Pesky and his partner under the moose head. “What’s he going to be charged with?”

A shrug. “That’s not up to me. That’s up to the State’s Attorney. But I’m betting he stays in jail this time, no matter how many honchos call.” His face betrayed no emotion. She knew there was something else the sheriff wanted to discuss. She was peering over his shoulder, eyes alert for Pamela’s gun, but it had vanished: into Audrey’s black medical bag, she suspected. Pamela would never see it again. “This Pesky says he was taking photos through the skylight. I don’t see a camera anywhere. I suspect that one of you has it, but I don’t suppose you’ll admit that, will you?” He watched her face. “You don’t believe that story about the magazine any more than I do. Any idea what might be inside the house that he’d want to get pictures of?”

The manuscript. Pesky had been hoping to get a shot of the manuscript, not realizing that the papers were just Jericho’s will, and no longer on the premises. “Sorry. No idea.” She bore his scrutiny, wondering what those honchos had whispered in the sheriff’s ear, and whether he was asking his questions or theirs.

“I hear you were at the library,” he finally said. “You talked to Miss Kelly.”

“I was there,” Beck said, carefully.

“Miss Kelly says you asked her what Mr. Ainsley had been up to. She says you wouldn’t leave her alone until she told you.”

“Our conversation was confidential.”

Sheriff Garvey nodded, one hand on his belt. Behind him, they had Pesky up on the gurney and were rolling him toward the ambulance. “Is that why you were at Mr. Navarro’s office this afternoon?”

“That was another confidential matter.”

“And what about having another drink with my deputy? Which I distinctly told you not to do? Was that confidential, too?”

She spread her hands. “I really can’t help you, Sheriff.”

“May I give you a word of advice? Stay away from him.”

“Because of his—theories?”

“Because Pete Mundy is a married man and it’s a small town.” He spoke softly, the way the executioner does when he knows you have nowhere to hide. “A woman like you can wreck a man’s career.”

She stifled about sixteen different retorts. “Thank you for the advice,” she said coldly.

“Just doing my job,” he said, unsmiling. “I understand you’re leaving us day after tomorrow.”

“Probably.”

“I think that’s a very good idea.” Garvey turned away, but before he did, Beck caught his glance. He was looking up above her head, toward the house. She swung around. The windows of Jericho’s suite. Although in the darkness the sight could easily have been her imagination, Rebecca thought for an instant that she saw his rigid face, glowering down at the mess on his lawn, before receding into the shadows.

(iii)

Beck crouched on the window seat of her bedroom, curtains wide open, staring up at the plateau from which she had, just hours ago, looked down at the house. Pesky had been up there, taking photographs. Pamela had downloaded the images from his digital camera. The investigator had been all over the property, unseen, snapping photos of everything in sight. Pete Mundy had arrested him. Sheriff Garvey had let him out again because some honcho had called.

And he had returned to the scene to snap more pictures.

All this for a magazine, and fifty thousand dollars?

Some of the images were the same as the ones Lewiston Clark had left behind when he left Mrs. Rennie’s boarding house in a hurry. It did not take a genius to see that the two men had been working together; or that Pesky had to be the man who had visited Clark, causing him to leave in such a rush.

After his release. After the call from the honcho.

Doing her sums, she put the events in the proper order. Pesky and Clark, working together, Pesky as outside man, Clark as inside man. When Clark could not talk his way in, Pesky doubled his efforts with the camera. When Pesky got arrested, somebody had him sprung, and that somebody obviously lit a fire under them both. So Pesky returned to the house, and even climbed on the roof in his desperation.

As for Clark, she had no idea where he was. If he had any sense, he had fled. It occurred to her that there was a Keystone Kops quality to the episode. If these two were the best that Pete Mundy’s strangers could muster, then Jericho had nothing to worry about.

And yet she wondered.

Dak’s presence suggested another, more malevolent force at work. The old spy was concerned, and the likes of Pesky and Clark would not concern him.

She wondered whether Jericho has reached her boss’s boss’s boss, to extend her stay at Stone Heights. She hoped not. In any event, this
time, Beck decided, she would not allow Jericho to dictate events. She had promised him only that she would be here until Thursday, and so Thursday it would be. To leave any later would be to allow her ex-lover to manipulate her. But to leave earlier would be a breach of her promise, and a sign of panic besides.

Dak had assured her she was not in any danger, and Jericho had told her the same thing. She assumed they knew what they were talking about. Nevertheless, sitting there on the window seat, gazing out into the darkness, Rebecca experienced a sharp surge of gratitude for the unexpected gift she had found on Sunday night under a false bottom in the bamboo basket that held extra towels in her bathroom. Searching in odd places had become second nature to her during her time with Jericho—whenever they would check into a hotel, she would join him in peeking under furniture and behind cabinets for hidden bugs—and even after fifteen years, now that Beck was back at Stone Heights she had reverted automatically to old habits.

A good thing Audrey was less suspicious, because what Beck discovered, courtesy of Jericho’s paranoia, was a Glock 9mm, Model 19, complete with extended magazine—the compact version of the gun he had once taught her to shoot, up in these sad, brooding mountains.

Not that she would need it, of course. In two days, she would be gone from Stone Heights, presumably forever. Nevertheless, she locked both doors to the suite, then sneaked the Glock from its new hiding place beneath the mattress. She stood in front of the mirror, practicing her grip, and remembering her second-biggest fight with Jericho, after he marched her into the woods one afternoon and made her fire off an entire magazine at a family of squirrels.

She killed one.

When they come
, he had murmured, leading his weeping lover back to the house,
your aim will have to be better than that
.

She could hardly fire a gun in the guest room, but she could work on her grip and her draw. And so, silently acknowledging Jericho’s long-ago instruction, she practiced and practiced, on into the wee hours.

WEDNESDAY

CHAPTER 19
The Lawyer

(i)

On Wednesday morning, everything was fine. Pamela was monopolizing the computer, and Audrey prepared a huge breakfast too healthy for anybody to eat. Swallowing the slithery remains of whatever is left of an egg after you take the good stuff out, Rebecca found herself longing for those carb-heavy meals of pasta and bread. The nun said excitedly that she had a line on a handyman to take Mr. Lobb’s place, and also that she was making headway in persuading Jericho that the house needed a full-time nurse.

Beck sat in the kitchen and picked at her food, then turned the conversation where Audrey obviously did not want to go: toward the events of the previous night. And Audrey, after initially resisting, yielded, and joined her at the table.

“He wasn’t trying to break in,” the nun pointed out. “He was taking pictures.”

Beck swirled the egg whites with her fork. She watched Audrey’s cautious eyes. “And that doesn’t seem strange to you, Aud? That a man would climb on top of your father’s house with a camera to take pictures?”

Audrey crinkled her nose. “Of course it’s strange. That’s why I’m glad they arrested him. I’m sorry about his leg, though. I hope he heals soon.”

Beck choked back a wave of sympathy. “I’m sorry too. But he shouldn’t have been on the roof.”

The house phone rang, but neither of them moved, because they knew it would be for Pamela, who would pick up the extension in the study.

The nun shook her head. “Everybody who gets hurt by somebody else, there’s always a reason. A lot of them are good reasons. But the people are still hurt.” She was fingering the cross around her neck, and Beck knew she was remembering the work she had fled. “Sometimes I think that’s the main grudge Sean holds against Dad. He thinks Dad made the world worse.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think he made mistakes, and some of them were costly. But we all do that. He did the best he could, same as we all do when we—”

“Didn’t you hear me calling you?” snapped Pamela from the doorway. “It’s for you. Not you. For Rebecca.”

(ii)

“I’m not calling too early, am I?” said Tish Kirschbaum. “I figure you guys get up early out west.”

Beck took the portable phone out onto the deck, enjoying the mountain chill. For three or four minutes, the old friends exchanged pleasantries. Tish was every bit as divorced as Beck, and was raising a son alone, but seemed to suffer less.

“Scondell Bloom,” said Tish, when Rebecca finally got around to the reason for her call. “Wow. I totally forgot your guy was there.”

“He’s not my guy.”

“Used to be, though.”

“What can you tell me?”

“Not much. I assume you know how the firm collapsed— Wait. Do you know how private equity works? They raise money to buy companies—not stocks, whole companies—and then they make the
companies more efficient, stripping them of a lot of valuable assets on the way, and restructure them, and sell them back to the public, usually at a profit. And the partners, well, they make out like fat rats. The guys who founded Scondell Bloom paid themselves hundreds of millions of dollars each.”

“What went wrong?”

“Nobody really knows. I have a friend at the United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan, and from what he says, I would guess that the firm did a lot of investing overseas, and a lot of that money just vanished. What has them puzzled is that these weren’t dicey Third World investments. This money was in countries with serious financial regulation, transparency, whatever you want. It still vanished. It’s as if the foreign regulators were all looking the wrong way. But a lot of them are upstanding citizens, wealthy in their own right. Not the sort to commit crimes, and not the sort to take bribes. The prosecutors don’t know what happened. That’s why they just indicted Bloom and Scondell for wire fraud and mail fraud. They can’t prove what happened to the money, so they accused them of continuing to raise funds when they knew the money was gone.” A laugh over the line—Tish loved to find the flaws in capitalism. These days, she had a lot of company. “A billion dollars might be missing. Maybe more. We’re not talking losses. We’re talking money that just disappeared.”