Lady.’”
The name made her laugh. “Hear what it’s called?” she asked her companion.
“Yep.”
“Isn’t that perfect!”
“How much?” he asked.
The jeweler looked him in the eye. If the man had been Japanese or Korean or an Arab, he’d have known the sale was in the bag. As it was, Americans in khakis and baseball caps were a tough call. “I can sell it to sir today for $24,000.”
Her eyes widened. This was the most expensive one. Still, she loved it, and let him know by nervously touching the bare skin of his forearm.
“We’ll take it,” he said without hesitation.
“Very good, sir. How would sir like to pay?”
“Just put it on my room. We’re staying in the Piazza Suite.”
The jeweler would have to pop into the back room to confirm the sale but he was feeling solid. The suite was one of their best, fourteen-hundred square feet of marble and opulence, with a spa and sunken living room.
She was wearing the watch when they left the shop. The sky over St. Mark’s Square was perfectly baby blue with just the right assortment of fluffy cumulus clouds. A gondola ferrying a rigid, unsmiling Swiss couple glided by. The gondolier launched into song to stir up some emotion in his charges, and his rich voice echoed off the dome. Everything was perfect, her companion thought. The non-Mediterranean temperature, the absence of brackish smells from real canals, and no pigeons. He hated the dirty birds ever since his parents had taken him to the authentic St. Mark’s Square as a shy and sensitive boy and a tourist lobbed a handful of bread crumbs near his feet. The pigeon swarm nightmarishly overwhelmed him, and even as an adult he recoiled when he saw flapping wings.
She was wearing the watch as they strolled arm in arm through the lobby of the Venetian Hotel.
She was wearing the watch in the elevator, cocking her hand at an angle to catch the attention of the three ladies riding with them.
And she was wearing the watch and nothing else up in the suite when she gave him the best sex he’d ever had.
He let her call him Mark now, and instead of Lydia, she let him use her real name, Kerry. Kerry Hightower.
She was from Nitro, West Virginia, a river town founded at the turn of the century around a gunpowder plant. It was a gritty place notable for little except that Clark Gable once worked there as a telephone repairman. Growing up poor, she watched old Clark Gable movies and dreamed of becoming a Hollywood actress.
In junior high she discovered her acting skills were not abundant but she doggedly tried out for every school play and community production, landing small supporting roles only because she was so earnest and attractive. But in high school she discovered a higher talent. She loved sex, was extremely good at it, and was completely and charmingly uninhibited. In a revelation, she settled on a new amalgamated calling: she decided she would become a porn star.
A fellow cheerleader, two years older, had moved to Las Vegas and was working as a card dealer. To Kerry, Vegas was nine-tenths on the way to California, where, as she understood it, the adult film business flourished. A week after graduation from Nitro High, she bought a one-way ticket to Nevada and moved in with her old chum. Life there wasn’t easy, but her sunny disposition kept her afloat. She bopped around from one low-paying job to another until she landed, if not on her feet, on her back at an escort agency.
When she’d met Mark at the Constellation, she was on her fourth agency in three years, finally accumulating a little money. She only worked for higher-end outfits where her non-pierced, nontattooed, girl-next-door persona was valued. Most of the men she dated were nice enough fellows-she could count the number of times on one hand when she felt abused or threatened. She never fell for any of her customers-they were johns, after all-but Mark was different.
From the start she found him nerdy and sweet with no macho pretenses. He was wicked smart too, and his job at Area 51 drove her crazy with curiosity because, when she was ten, she was certain she’d seen a flying saucer one summer night, darting high over the Kanawha River, as bright as a jar of lightning bugs collected on the riverbank.
And in the past few weeks, he had dropped the pseudonym and started buying up all of her time and lavishing presents on her. She was starting to feel more like a girlfriend and less like a call girl. He was getting more self-assured by the day, and while he was never going to be Clark Gable, he was beginning to grow on her.
She was unaware that with $5 million sitting high and dry in an offshore bank account, he was feeling more confident about the accomplishments of Mark Shackleton. Peter Benedict was gone. He wasn’t needed anymore.
Even the bathrooms in the suite had flat-screen TVs. Mark got out of the shower and started toweling himself. There was a cable channel on. He wasn’t paying attention until he heard the word Doomsday and looked up to see Will Piper on a replay of the weekly FBI press conference, standing tall at a podium speaking into a crop of microphones. The sight of Will on TV always made his heart race. He reached for his toothbrush without taking his eyes off the screen and began brushing his teeth.
The last time he’d seen Will at a media briefing, he looked lackluster and dispirited. The postcards and killings had stopped and the wall-to-wall coverage was no longer sustainable. The long unsolved case had drained the public and law enforcement alike. But he seemed more energized today. The old intensity was back. Mark pushed the volume button.
“I can say this,” Will was saying. “We are pursuing some new leads and I remain completely confident we will catch the killer.”
That irritated Mark and he said, “Oh, bullshit! Give it up, man,” before turning off the TV.
Kerry was snoozing on the bed, naked underneath a thin sheet. Mark cinched his bathrobe and retrieved his laptop from his briefcase in the suite’s sunken living room. He went online and saw he had an e-mail from Nelson Elder. Elder’s list was longer than usual-business was good. It took Mark the better part of half an hour to complete the job and reply via his secure portal.
He went back to the bedroom. Kerry was stirring. She waved her adorned wrist in the air and said something about how great it would be to have a matching necklace. She threw off the sheet and sweetly beckoned him with a finger.
At that precise moment, Will and Nancy were having the opposite of sex. They were sitting at Will’s office plowing through a mind-numbing mountain of bad screenplays, completely unsure of the object of their exercise.
“Why were you so confident at the news conference?” she asked him.
“Did I overdo it?” he asked sleepily.
“Oh, yeah. Big-time. I mean, what do we have here?”
Will had to shrug. “A wild-goose chase is better than doing nothing.”
“You should’ve told the press that. What are you going to say next week?”
“Next week’s a week away.”
The wild-goose chase almost didn’t happen. Will’s initial call to the Writers Guild of America was a disaster. They lit into him about the Patriot Act and vowed to fight till Hell froze over to prevent the government from getting its mitts on a single script in its archives. “We’re not looking for terrorists,” he had protested, “just a demented serial killer.” But the WGA was not going to give in without a fight, so he got his superiors to sign off on a subpoena.
Screenwriters, Will learned, were a squirrelly lot, paranoid about producers, studios, and especially other writers ripping them off. The WGA gave them a modicum of comfort and protection by registering their scripts and storing them electronically or in hard copy in case proof of ownership was ever required. You didn’t have to be a guild member-any amateur hack could register his script. All you did was send a fee and a copy of the screenplay and you were done. There were West Coast and East Coast chapters of the WGA. Over fifty thousand scripts a year were registered with WGA West alone, a tidy little business for the guild.
The Department of Justice had a tricky time with the probable cause section of the subpoena. It was “fanciful,” Will was told but they’d give it the old college try. The FBI ultimately succeeded at the Ninth District
