The Wrong Man: A Novel of Suspense (27 page)

He landed in a heap on the next landing, groaning. She couldn’t take the chance of trying to maneuver by him. Grabbing a breath, she tore up the stairs, one flight, then another and another. She was on six finally. She burst into the apartment and raced to the main door and into the hallway.

She jabbed frantically at the elevator button and saw to her dismay it was on one. But there was no sign of Holt behind her. Finally the elevator reached the floor. She threw herself inside and pressed one. When she reached the ground floor, she held her breath and peered out. Still no sign of Holt. She charged through the lobby and out the main door.

It was dark, but there were people in the street. She ran toward Broadway, her lungs on fire. And then up ahead, rushing toward her with his phone in his hand was Garrett Kelman. Tears of relief welled in her eyes.

“Are you okay?” he yelled.

“Yes.” She touched her head. There was already a lump from where the ladder had rammed into her.

“The building number you gave me was wrong. I was rushing up and down the street trying to find you.”

“He tried to kill me. My doctor client. He was involved with Healy.”

“Where is he?”

“Still in the building, I think. He’s injured. He fell down the stairs.”

“I called the cops. They say they’re coming.”

“He killed Healy. And Avery, too.”

He pulled her into his arms, pressing her against his chest. The leather of his jacket was cool from the night air.

“I felt so helpless,” he said. “I could hear you, but I had no idea where you were. Just tell me you’re really okay.”

She pulled back for a moment and looked at him.

“Yes,” she said, a smile forming on her face. “I kind of managed to beat the shit out of him.”

He smiled. “Way to go.”

And then, not far from them, they heard sirens.

“It must be the cops,” Kelman said. “I told them to come midway down the block. We better go meet them.”

Two and a half weeks later Kit moved back to her apartment.

Baby came down with her that day, along with her housekeeper, who Baby had enlisted to help not only haul bags but Swiffer away the layer of dust that had settled over everything. Kit thought how nice it would have been to have Dara in the mix, too, but she was still on leave and they weren’t sure if she’d ever return.

After they’d organized the office and the housekeeper had departed, Baby opened a bag of sandwiches she’d packed and a bottle of rosé. She and Kit settled on the sofa.

“Your apartment looks great, but just say the word and you can be back at my place in a heartbeat,” Baby told her. She was dressed for spring today, in cream-colored pants and a pale pink blouse. Her nails matched the blouse perfectly.

“Thanks,” Kit said, “but I’m ready to be home. You know what’s really going to kill me, though? Sliding into my sheets tonight and remembering what yours feel like in comparison. But it’s given me something to aspire to.”

“At least now I know what to get you for your next birthday.”

“Don’t you dare think of getting me
anything
. I owe you so much, Baby.”

“You would have done the same for me, Kit—though, God
forbid I ever get to meet some dashing male stranger with a dark secret. But in all seriousness, do you really feel safe?”

Holt had survived the fall down the stairs with only a broken arm, cracked ribs, and a mild concussion, but he’d been arrested immediately and was being held without bail.

“Yes, I think I feel safe,” Kit told Baby.

“That sounds tentative.”

“Let’s put it this way, with Holt out of the picture, I don’t feel in imminent danger. As for Ithaka, there’s enough evidence against them on the insider trading front that I’m low on their list of concerns. I’ll probably look over my shoulder sometimes just out of habit, but I’m ready to get back to my life.”

Well, not exactly, she thought. As she’d already realized, she didn’t want to return to the old way. She wanted something new. Gutsier choices.

Baby took a swig of her rosé, appeared to briefly relish the taste, and then turned pensive.

“I’m still troubled by the fact that I was such a bad judge of men. I practically had you engaged to Keith Holt.”

“I never saw anything sinister about him either,” Kit admitted. “He seemed intense at times, but I always expect surgeons to be that way.”

“And I take it he never had any intentions of redecorating?”

“No, no, that was all a big fat lie. On the same day that Healy reported to him about me taking the flash drive, he called and asked for an appointment so he could assess me and try to figure out what I was up to. The only thing he ever intended to redecorate was my neck.”

“And was the apartment hunting story all a ruse, too?”

“Yes. I’m sure when he first mentioned the idea to me he was just planting a seed in case he ever needed to lure me alone someplace.”

“I accept that you can’t tell me why he wanted you dead or
how it connects to the case, but I have to say, it’s torturing me not knowing. I can’t stand the thought of how close he came to hurting you.”

“One day in the not too distant future I
will
be able to talk about it, and I’ll share everything.”

Baby sighed, drumming her fingers softly on the arm of the sofa.

“Well, we might have been wrong about Holt, but there’s one man you guessed right about from the start. He who carries a big spear.”

Kit laughed.

“Yeah, I made plenty of mistakes along the way, but my initial sense of Garrett Kelman was right. That he was a man worth knowing.”

Kelman had gone with her to the police precinct the night she’d been attacked, waited with her for Nat Naylor, and then dropped her off at Baby’s later. By that point her body felt like one huge, throbbing bruise—from her being knocked to the floor and dragged, from being conked by the aluminum ladder. She’d slept that night as if she was drugged.

She’d seen Kelman again the next morning. He’d come to Baby’s briefly just to check on her. A day or so later he’d taken off for Florida with his attorney to straighten matters out with Molinari and her partner, and to spend time with his sister, whom he’d given the all-clear to come home.

Since he’d left town, Kit had heard from him just twice—brief phone calls to see how she was doing. She had no idea what the future held for them. She trusted him now, and felt as drawn to him as she had that night in Islamorada, and yet she had begun to wonder if he was distancing himself, not because he didn’t experience the same connection but because it was all too complicated, and there was too much cold, black water under the bridge.

And then he’d called today to say he was back and was hoping to see her, as soon as tonight. She had suggested he come by her place and that she’d fix them both something simple for dinner.

“I should probably let you settle in,” Baby said. “I’ll see you tomorrow for work.”

“Now that you’ve gotten a taste of working from home every day, would you prefer to do more of it.”

“God no. I feel energized coming down here. Oh, by the way, if you have the time tomorrow, I can take you to the hotel. The building’s not more than a shell right now, but it will be good for you to see the exterior and the neighborhood. That needs to be considered as we start to brainstorm.”

Last week, much to their satisfaction, they’d learned that they’d landed the hotel job. Harper would be a challenge, but Baby said she would do much of the heavy lifting when it came to dealing with him personally.

“Oh, I have a piece of good news myself,” Kit announced. “Last night I heard from a friend of Barry Kaplan’s, another single guy. Barry showed him the boards and he wants me to do something similar at his place.”

Baby laughed. “Well that’s an insider trading tip we could pass along if we wanted to. There’s about to be a huge run on pinstriped flannel.”

After Baby took off, Kit wandered back into her office. Despite the awful associations the space had with Avery’s death, it was good to be back there, too, and to realize that her business wasn’t going to go down the tubes. The next weeks were likely to be insane, but she was also determined to work smarter than she had in the past, to leave time for both play and travel.

For the rest of the afternoon, she tackled a backlog of emails, spoke on the phone to her parents—whom it had taken four days to calm down once they learned about the incident with
Holt—and had her friend Chuck over for coffee. Like Baby, he was frustrated by not being able to hear many details about her situation, other than what he’d read in the
Daily News
and
New York Post
, but he was relieved she was safe.

“They were all abuzz about you at work,” Chuck said. “You know how Mavis is. She thinks the only coverage that matters is in
World of Interiors
or
Architectural Digest
. But she seemed totally intrigued. You may have turned her into a
New York Post
reader.”

Kit laughed. “Well, at least I gave her a glimpse of another side of life.”

At seven Kelman arrived.

He was wearing jeans and a dress shirt, with his navy pullover sweater loosely thrown around his shoulders, not like some preppy gesture but more of an afterthought. His face was clean-shaven, and she noticed that there was little trace remaining of that awful weariness. At the sight of him she felt a crazy mix of relief and desire.

“How are you, Kit?” he said, embracing her in a hug.

When he pulled back, she saw him glance around the apartment, taking it in. She knew he must be thinking the same thing as her: that it was strange for him to be standing there under such different circumstances than the last time.

“Good.”

“You sure?”

“Uh huh. Like I told Baby, it’s going to take a while to get my sea legs again, but I’ll be fine. Tell me about Miami. It didn’t seem like you wanted to say much on the phone.”

“Sorry to be so guarded when I spoke to you. I doubt the FBI has your cell phone bugged, but I can’t help but feel a little paranoid these days. And I didn’t want to say anything about the case since they warned us not to discuss it with each other.”

“Do you feel comfortable talking about it now?”

“Actually I do. As you’d expect, I promised not to divulge any specific information I’ve shared with the FBI about trades and phone calls—and I won’t—but I don’t see any harm in the two of us doing a postmortem. The only way I can make sure you’re out of danger—and I am too—is to keep communicating with you about what’s going on.”

“That works for me,” she said. “So then tell me, do you feel you righted things with Molinari and her partner?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’m out of the woods with her. She’d been in touch with the FBI and the cops in New York. And I assume she talked to you?”

“Yes. I gave her a statement and she seemed satisfied with it, though she was far from pleased that I’d been in contact with you and had never updated her.”

Kelman dropped his sweater on an armchair and they’d settled on stools in front of the island.

“Would you like a glass of wine?” she asked. “I actually have a decent Bordeaux I’ve been saving.”

“I’d love that.” She brought out the bottle and two glasses, and as Kelman uncorked the wine, she set up a plate of olives and Parmesan cheese, items that had been in her fridge since before she moved in with Baby.

“I think this cheese is okay,” she said, smiling. “It said ‘aged thirty-seven months’ or something like that on the label, and I’ve added only an extra month to that.”

“I’m famished so I’ll take my chances,” he said, grinning back. She realized how little she’d seen him smile since Florida.

“This may be getting too close to the area that’s off-limits, but did Holt’s name ever surface when you first learned about the insider trading?” Kit asked.

“Never. But it had been a fluke for me to intercept the call from that one doctor, and the chances of me stumbling on another player were slim. There was nothing about Holt in the
records I logged into. And any payments to Holt would have been made in cash.”

“Do you think Healy was in cahoots with Kennelly and Lister or was he working all by his lonesome?”

“The three of them must have been working together, because it’s hard to imagine two sets of them concocting basically the same scheme. And I still think Wainwright knew about it all. I’ll bet they came up with the plan with Wainwright’s approval or even at his instigation.

“But if they’d already seduced one doctor, why go to the trouble of paying a second for the same info?”

“They probably divided up the work and each went after various members of the advisory board, hoping to corrupt just one of them. And then, lo and behold, they landed two fish.”

“There’s one thing I still don’t understand. Holt’s an orthopedic surgeon. How did he end up on an advisory board for a cancer drug?”

“I know next to nothing about medicine, but I did a little investigating online and the drug that was tested is meant to treat blood cell disorders beyond leukemia. It’s apparently also being tested on lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. I saw that one of his areas of expertise were problems caused by arthritis so he would have been a legitimate candidate for the advisory board.”

“It seems so insane for him to have put his career in jeopardy.”

“His need for money clearly overrode any fear of the risk he was taking. I’m sure Healy paid him well for his information.”

“But how could Holt presume that killing Healy and stealing the flash drive from me would solve his problems? Wouldn’t he have realized that there were other ways for him to be implicated?”

“Maybe not. I suspect he believed Healy was working solo and had no idea there were other players in the mix. So Holt
told himself that once he eliminated Healy and made sure the flash drive didn’t come to light, he’d be safe. I was still in the picture, of course, but without the flash drive, I obviously didn’t seem like a threat to him.”

“Is there any chance the person who broke into your place in Miami could have been Holt?”

“No way. I didn’t manage a good look at the guy, but I could tell he was on the young side—and definitely not an amateur.”

“Then you still think it was Ithaka?”

“Yes. They probably sent someone as soon as Matt tipped them off to where I was staying. He must have told them I had the flash drive, but they surely wondered what else I had that could prove damaging to them. Remember how you thought someone had been in your apartment a week before the big break-in? I bet Ithaka was behind that, as well. It was done by a pro who made only one tiny mistake with your pillows.”

“That makes sense. Holt talked about hacking his way into my place, which suggests he was there just once.”

Kelman took a final swig of his wine and set the glass back down.

“So are you still up for some dinner?” she asked. Part of her was worried he might find an excuse to split now that they’d completed their postmortem. “I haven’t had a chance to stock up on groceries yet, but I thought I’d throw together something super simple.”