“What do you care?”
“I don’t,” she said. I believed her.
Her silver Porsche pulled away, leaving me on the downtown sidewalk with a baby girl in my arms.
Toni’s Corvette came around the corner.
“I don’t know how much ‘all’ is,” I said, reasonably. “But she has out-front assets of something like thirty mil. On paper, it was all supposed to have come from her father’s business, but all that paper’s bogus…just a screen.”
“How do you know this?”
“Daniel Parks wasn’t just stealing from you,” I said. “He had a whole long sucker-list. But he had to find a place to stash the money. Spend some money yourself, check out the divorce papers his wife had filed. Parks had a mistress. Her name, her real name, is Beryl Summerdale.”
“Beryl Summerdale,” the Russian repeated carefully, committing the name I’d given him to memory.
“That’s right. And I’ve got something else for you, too. She’s got access to her money online. Right over a modem. If you could get her to tell you the right numbers…”
Beryl Summerdale’s neighbors hadn’t heard a thing until the house on Castle Crescent suddenly burst into flames at approximately three in the morning.
It took the local Fire Department only minutes to respond to their frantic calls, but the house was already incinerated.
The Arson Squad said a highly sophisticated series of incendiary devices had been used, but no more information could be released at this time.
The crime-scene investigators said “human bone fragments” had been located.
The lead detective on the case said that the house was known to have been owned and occupied by Ms. Summerdale and her infant daughter. Both were presumed to have perished in the explosion.
The Special Agent in Charge of the local FBI office said that speculation about terrorists targeting the wrong house “has, to the best of our knowledge, no basis in fact at this time,” although he acknowledged that the neighborhood was home to several prominent D.C. insiders.
Beryl Summerdale had no known enemies. Her ex-husband had been ruled out. The police had no suspects.
“Her name is Charisse, after my mother,” Loyal said. “Of all the things you did for me, she was the best. I never even knew how much I wanted—”
“It’s what I wanted, too,” I said. Pure truth.
“You know where I’ll be, Lew.”
“You’ll be home.”
“Home with my little girl,” Loyal said. She stood close, her heart in her eyes. “Your home, too, if you ever want one,” she said, very softly.
“I just might,” I said, lying to her for what I knew was the last time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Vachss has been a federal investigator of sexually transmitted diseases, a social-services caseworker, and a labor organizer, and has directed a maximum-security prison for “aggressive-violent” youth. Now a lawyer in private practice, he represents children and youths exclusively. He is the author of numerous novels, including the Burke series, two collections of short stories, and a wide variety of other material, among them song lyrics, graphic novels, essays, and a “children’s book for adults.” His books have been translated into twenty languages, and his work has appeared in
The dedicated Web site for Vachss and his work is www.vachss.com.
ALSO BY ANDREW VACHSS
Copyright © 2006 by Andrew Vachss
All rights reserved.
