Split Second

now, including us, but particularly you, Savich. You’re the face of the people after her.”

Savich nodded. “Thanks, Dane. Please keep us posted. We’ll all watch our backs.” Savich turned to Lucy, studied her for a moment, and seemed satisfied. He asked Coop, “Okay, let’s get to Lucy now. What have you guys got for us?”

Coop said smoothly, “Along with the ring in the safe-deposit box, Lucy told me there was also a letter addressed to her from her grandfather. We went by Lucy’s house to get the letter, Savich, and guess what? It was gone.”

A letter? You never told me about a letter. A sin of omission is still a lie, and I hate lies. What Savich was thinking was as clear to Lucy as if he’d spoken aloud, pointing a finger at her. How could he ever come to trust her again? When he spoke, though, his voice was smooth and calm. “So, your grandfather wrote you an explanation of the ring. That makes sense. Okay, so the letter has disappeared? Where’d you leave it, Lucy?”

She said, “About the letter, Dillon, maybe I should have told you when you came to my house—”

He raised a hand, cutting her off. “I know about it now. Tell us where you left it.”

“I folded it carefully and slipped it in the back of a book on UFOs on a shelf near my grandmother’s desk two days ago. It never occurred to me it wouldn’t be safe there. I don’t think anyone had looked in there in years.”

Savich tapped his pen on the table. “That means someone knew the letter existed, or maybe suspected it existed. They took it before the attempt on your life. If you had died, Lucy, then there would be no evidence there ever was a letter, so there would be no possible clues leading to them. Either that or the people were looking for the ring, and when they found only the letter, they assumed you had the ring with you.”

Coop said, “We didn’t see any obvious evidence of a breakin. It occurred to us someone might have bugged the house, since they seemed to know so much.”

“We’ll get a countersurveillance team over there to check for bugs, look more carefully for signs someone was poking around your grandmother’s study. Lucy, can you think of anyone who could have known about the letter?”

“Maybe someone at the bank or the law office. Otherwise, I only told Coop about it yesterday. We didn’t mention it to my relatives last night.”

Savich leaned forward now, and looked at her dead-on. “Why did you take so long to admit there was a letter, Lucy?”

Coop took her hand, squeezed it, a simple thing, really, but it steadied her, kept one of her endless apologies from popping out of her mouth. She said frankly, “I believed I should keep the contents of the letter private, since it was about my family and the events happened so long ago. Since there wasn’t any question about who killed my grandfather, it was no one’s business.”

Savich nodded. “Okay, Lucy, point taken. But now it’s a different ball game. Tell us all as close as you can what the letter said.”

She looked at each of the agents in turn, then said, “The bottom line was that my grandmother told my grandfather about the ring right after the death of my mother. He wrote about how she kept talking about the ring, about if only she’d had it with her, the ring could have saved my mother, and then she showed him the ring. He wrote that in her grief, my grandmother became obsessed with the ring and he feared for her sanity, and so he stole it. He said he couldn’t destroy it since it was my birthright, but he knew my father wouldn’t want me to have the ring, and so he was leaving it to me along with this letter to open after my father’s death. Of course, he never realized my father would die so young. He believed I’d be reading his letter when I was middle-aged. That’s about it.”

“He called it your birthright,” Ruth said. “A birthright implies it was something incredibly special, and only for you.”

Ollie asked, “What exactly happened to your mother, Lucy?”

“She was struck straight on by a drunk driver. My grandparents were in the car behind her.”

Savich said, “If your grandmother had only had the ring with her, she could have saved your mother? How could a ring stop a drunk driver from hitting your mother’s car? Did your grandfather’s letter tell you what those supposed powers were?”

“He wrote I wouldn’t believe him if he did.”

And then, of course, Savich asked the most important question of all. “Do you have any idea now what those powers are?”

As far as I can tell, I see absolutely nothing at all special about the ring. Or, if there is, I can’t figure it out. Believe me, I’ve tried to find out why anyone would want this ring badly enough to want to kill me for it.

Lucy wished she could say that whopping lie out loud, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She looked at him, mute for a moment, white as her shirt, the purple bruise on her jaw in stark relief. She said slowly, trying to lie clean, “No, I have no idea why the ring is so special. As I said, my grandfather didn’t tell me because he said I wouldn’t believe him. But someone believes the ring has some sort of power, and that someone believes he may know what it is.”

She knows, of course, and it scares her to her heels, Savich thought, but he only nodded. He didn’t expect her to say any more, and she didn’t. Maybe she couldn’t; maybe she was forbidden to. He shook his head at himself. His imagination was running away with him. He said, “Lucy’s right. Someone thinks he knows what the ring can do, and it’s worth killing for. Do you still wear it around your neck?”

She nodded.

“May we see it?”

Slowly, Lucy pulled the gold chain out of her shirt, the ring threaded through it. Every eye in the room went to it, as if pulled by an invisible wire. She took the ring from the chain and handed it to him.

Savich rolled it around in his palm and passed it to Dane to look at. He said, “You’ll see there’s that single Welsh word etched into it—SEFYLL—it means to stop moving, to become stationary.”

“Stop moving what?” Ollie said.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said.

Dane said the word aloud, and again, her heart seized for a moment, but nothing happened. All the agents had to repeat the word, and some of them got it close. Ruth said it right on the button. Lucy jerked, couldn’t help it, and she knew Savich saw it. As for Coop, he held her hand and said nothing at all.

Lucy took the ring back from Ollie, slid it onto the gold chain, and slipped it inside her shirt. All of them looked at the small bulge where the ring lay warm against her flesh.

“Your relatives,” Ruth said, “the Silvermans. They all know about the ring?”

“They denied even knowing about the ring; they didn’t show any interest when I told them last night. I know they have to be our first suspects, given what’s happened, but it’s hard to accept that. I grew up with them in my life, and they’re the only family I have left.” She looked around the conference table as she spoke.

Families, Savich thought. They were the very devil, if you wanted to be objective. “Lucy, I know how hard this is for you, but you need to keep an open mind. Now, you’re butt-deep in the swamp here. I want you to stick with Coop. Consider him another pair of jeans.”

Lucy saw Coop’s pants lying on the floor next to her bed, saw that Coop was grinning at her. She said, her voice cool, “I think that’s an excellent idea.”

There was a good deal of laughter.

Savich looked at Lucy again. “I could bring the Silvermans in for an interview, either together or separately, but the fact is, you and Coop have already found out what they had to say. We have no evidence yet of any complicity between them and the two men who tried to kill you, or the theft of the letter, so we don’t have enough probable cause to get a search warrant. They probably wouldn’t even speak to me without a lawyer at this point. So I’ll treat them as your family unless we find something definite to talk to them about.”

He paused for a moment, searching her face. “However, I’ve already done some checking into Alan Silverman’s financial dealings, and his longtime presidency at the Washington Federated Bank. You said you thought he was very rich, and retired from banking?”

“Yes, he retired nearly two years ago. As far as I know, he’s always had a great deal of money.”

“Lucy, he didn’t retire from the Washington Federated Bank like you were told. The board voted him out for