Down Here

“Maybe you just like the risks. I’ve known people like that.”

“Maybe I do,” she said. “Do you know how these work?”

^“See how much faith I have in you?” she purred. “With my hands behind my back like this, you could do . . . anything.”

“If you trust me, you know I won’t.”

“I know you would never do anything to hurt me,” she said. I wondered if she realized how much she sounded like one of the no-research investors she had been sneering at.

“I wouldn’t, Laura,” I said, guiding her shoulders down.

^“I could still ask him,” she said. It was much later; the candles were burned out.

“Okay.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic, J.”

“I guess I’m . . . not, actually. I thought he was the one who would have been enthusiastic. Most people want to tell their stories, especially if they believe it’s going to make them look good.”

“But you haven’t lost interest completely?”

“No, of course not. But I can’t put the whole project on hold waiting for—”

“Oh, I understand,” she said, squirming in close to me.

^“It’s not that big a risk,” Wolfe said. “If Toby’s . . . prediction doesn’t come true, it’s not like the DA has a better case against me. Besides, I trust him.”

“Toby?”

“Yes. Who else?”

“Not me, I understand.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you think my arteries are hardening—the ones to my brain. Your pal, Molly? No way he made copies of all the files he had in his storage unit. And no way you didn’t. You never trusted anyone in administration when you worked there. Probably got copies of every single piece of paper that ever went through your hands, somewhere.”

“It’s Molly who doesn’t trust you,” she said, not denying anything. “He said he was willing to take the chance of you shopping him, but he wasn’t going to give you the chance to do it to me.”

“Very protective of you, is he?”

“You have a problem with that?”

“No,” I said. “None of my business.”

“This whole thing is none of your business now,” Wolfe said, quietly. “It’s done. Maybe not wrapped up with a red ribbon and tied with a bow, but it’s done. I appreciate what you did, but . . . but I want you to stop now. Just stop.”

I got to my feet. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought I was helping.”

“Come on, Burke. Be yourself.”

“You got it,” I promised.

The next day, I kept my promise. I sat down with my family, and we made our plans.

If you think a “perfect crime” is some kind of rare event, you probably think all sociopaths are handsome, intelligent, and charming, too. Truth is, thousands of perfect crimes take place every day. Nobody ever gets arrested for them, much less convicted.

And if you think it takes a criminal genius to commit the perfect crime in America, you don’t know anything about incest.

“There’s other players, remember,” I warned my family. “Whoever shot him has to know by now that they didn’t get the job done.”

“He’s a piece of dry wood, Schoolboy,” the Prof said. “Lying on the ground, waiting for the forest fire to catch up to him. Why don’t we let the flame take the blame?”

“Nobody needs him dead now,” I said. “Nobody on our side, anyway. Wolfe doesn’t think she’ll even go to trial. Neither does Davidson. If whoever wanted him finds him before we do, there’s no loss, sure. But we can’t make that happen. Even if we could stake him out, how would we get the shooter to show up? Besides, it’s not about him anymore. It’s about the money.”

“You think there’s cash in his stash?”

“I don’t know, Prof. But there’s cash somewhere. Heavy cash. This whole thing reeks of it.”

“You mean, because he had protection when he was Inside?” Michelle said. “His little sister’s got money . . . and she was the one coming to see him the time he got shot.”

“The sister has some money,” I conceded. “And it doesn’t take a fortune to buy protection Inside. But Silver said the order came from the top, and there’s no way she’d even know how to make a contact like that.”

“He has not called,” the Mole said.

“What? You mean you—?”

“The card opened the garage,” he said, shrugging. “The basement has all the lines. We already had her numbers. It’s a simple relay unit—we record the calls at our end.”

“I didn’t know you were even going to . . .”

“I was in a Con Ed van,” the Mole said. “In and out in under fifteen minutes.”

“You leave any paint behind?” the Prof asked.

The Mole ignored him.

“He could use a lot of other ways to get in touch,” I said. “Or maybe he hasn’t reached out for her at all. I’ve spent a lot of time with her. Consecutive hours. She didn’t get any calls. So either her phones were turned off—and that doesn’t seem likely—or he’s not coming through that way.”

“Maybe he only has her work number, or her e-mail address,” Michelle said. “If I was his sister, Satan forbid, I wouldn’t want him to know where I lived.”

“Could be. I don’t know. And she never said.”

“So how would we be able to have a strategy, mahn?” Clarence asked. “Either he calls her at home—and he has not done that—or she convinces him to give you that ‘interview.’”

“We’re holding garbage,” I agreed. “But we already anted heavy, so it’s worth staying to see the last card.”

The tenants in the Lower East Side building were so old, I got called “boychick” more than once. Four of them stopped their canasta game long enough to tell me that the two girls who had lived in the second-floor apartment had been very nice, but kind of standoffish.

“You would think, coming from such a big family, that Hannah would have been a little more friendly,” an elderly lady with heavily rouged cheeks and an elaborate hairdo told me.

“She had a big family?”

“Well, either her or Jane—that was the roommate—must have. I never saw so many boys. Brothers or cousins. I could tell by the way they were acting, all together.”

“And they came after the . . . after it happened, too?”

“Oh yes,” another lady said. “But not right away, a few days later. Maybe they were from out of town.”

“Who can tell anymore?” a third lady said.

“Did Hannah and Jane leave with them?” I asked.

“Who pays attention, a time like that?” the rouged-cheeked lady said.

“And who should be surprised, her moving out, after such a thing?” a different lady said.

“You saw Hannah move out?” I asked.

“Hannah? Hannah never moved out, young man. She was murdered. Didn’t you know that? It was in the papers. Horrible! That’s when Jane moved out.”

“Like the Devil was chasing her,” the rouged-cheeked lady said. “In the middle of the night. Manny, the super, he said she hardly took any of her clothes, she was in such a hurry. Who could blame her? To have such a thing happen to your own roommate. It would be . . . I don’t have the words for it.”