Jack leaned attentively over her shoulder, smiling vaguely at the photo. ‘What am I looking at, dear?’
‘The necklace, Miriam’s necklace. That’swhat I’m going to bid on. I’ve had my eye on that necklace ever since I first met Miriam, oh, some years ago.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ Jack said, and in his eye was the glint, though Alice didn’t see it, of a man looking at a necklace he expects to inherit someday.
‘We have to do a sealed bid on somethingto get into the auction,’ she said with satisfaction, ‘and that’s what I’m after, and I believe I’ll get it.’
‘Won’t other people bid for it?’
‘Not for long,’ she said. ‘It’s extremely valuable, you know.’
‘Yes, it looks it.’
‘Mostpeople, Ibelieve,’ Alice said, ‘will just go for the baubles, because they won’t want to spend an awful lot of money this late in the season. Just so they take home some little thing. But Iwill bid on this necklace, and I’ll bid low, and because it’s so valuable it won’t come on the block until very late, when everybody else will already have their little something, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I get it for my opening bid.’
‘How clever you are, Alice,’ Jack said, and patted her shoulder before he went back around to his seat and his Wall Street Journal.
She continued to smile at the necklace in the photo. ‘What a coup,’ she said. ‘To get that necklace cheap, and to wear it on everyoccasion.’ Like all very wealthy women, Alice had strange cold pockets of miserliness. Her eyes shone as she looked across the table at Jack. ‘It will be an absolute steal,’ she said.
5
Trooper Sergeant Jake Farley of the Snake River County sheriff’s department had never seen anything like thisbefore. Four dead, one dying, all questions, no answers. Nothing but frustration, all the way around.
Starting with blowhard ‘Captain’ Robert Hardawl and his collection of retards and misfits that he called the Christian Renewal Defense Force. Hardawl and his scruffy gang had been a thorn in Sergeant Farley’s side for years, always threatening violence, never quite going far enough to get themselves busted up and put away where they couldn’t be an offense to decent law enforcement people anymore.
Two, three times a year, Farley would sit down with Agent Mobley from the Miami office of the FBI to discuss the various hate groups and paramilitary loonies wandering around these swamps, and Hardawl and his crowd were always prominent in that discussion. And now they’ve gone ahead at last and killed two men, and there wasn’t one blessed thing Farley could do about it, because, goddammit, it was self-defense, and Hardawl had his own two dead bodies to prove it, shot with the same firearm that shot Daniel Parmitt.
Who was another frustration. Who the hell was he? Some rich fella from Texas, that’s all, spending part of the winter in Palm Beach, grabbed up by two professional killers from Baltimore either because somebody wanted Daniel Parmitt dead to inherit his money, maybe? or because they got the wrong man.
Being unable to ask Gowan and Vavrina who hired them because they’d been all shot to shit by Hardawl’s people, and being unable to ask Parmitt who might want him dead because he damn near wasdead, unconscious and slowly slipping away, meant Farley had nobody to ask anything except Hardawl and his pack of losers, who didn’t know anything. It was enough to make a man bite his badge.
Four days. The Baltimore police and the Maryland state police had shared all the information they had on Gowan and Vavrina, which was a lot, but didn’t include the name of their most recent employer. The San Antonio police had passed on to Farley what they could find out about Parmitt, which wasn’t much: never been in trouble with the law, owned a house in a nice part of town, was loved by his bankers. The Breakers had sent along Parmitt’s possessions from the hotel, which consisted mainly of resort wear. He traveled with his birth certificate, which was about the only oddity Farley had seen in it all.
Snake River County didn’t get much of what Jake Farley thought of as big-city crime, meaning gangland killings, professional armed robbery, that sort of thing, but what they did get was all his; he was the one man in the sheriff’s department who’d been through the FBI courses and the state CID courses and had even been sent off with the help of federal funding for a couple of courses at John Jay College of Criminal Justice up in New York City; thathad been an experience.
But even that hadn’t prepared him for this situation. He had the victim, he had the perps far too many perps, in fact he had the weapons, he had every damn thing, and yet he couldn’t have known less about what was going on if he was a brand-new baby boy. So here he was on the fourth day of the so-called investigation, seated at his corner desk in the bullpen at the sheriff’s department, trying to think of somebody to call, when his phone rang. He gave it a jaundiced look before he answered: ‘Farley.’
‘Meany here, Sarge.’
Meany was the deputy on duty at the hospital, to report any change in Parmitt’s condition, so this was the one phone call Farley had definitely not wanted: ‘So he’s dead, huh?’
‘Well, no, sir. The reason I’m calling, he woke up.’
Farley’s back lost its slump: ‘What?’
‘And there’s a woman here to see him.’
‘A woman? For Parmitt?’
‘Yes, sir. Read about it in the Miami Herald, she said, said she had to talk to him.’
‘Not before me,’ Farley said. ‘Hold her there, keep him awake, I’ll be right over.’
The woman was a good-looking blonde of about forty with some heft to her; the kind of woman Farley was attracted to, in his off-duty hours. In fact, the kind of woman he was married to, which meant his off-duty hours were few and far between.
And this wasn’t one of them. He entered the waiting room, saw Meany standing there, saw the woman rise from one of the green vinyl sofas, and crossed to her to say, ‘Trooper Sergeant Farley, sheriff’s department.’ He did not offer to shake hands.
She said, ‘I’m Lesley Mackenzie.’
