Both men knew that the game was up.
Quinn pointed his revolver at Schueller and with his free hand motioned for him to come forward.
Schueller smiled. Shrugged.
Instead of moving forward, he backpedaled, and the propeller had him.
Quinn heard the engine’s roar momentarily change pitch, saw Schueller suddenly become parts rather than a whole human being. Quinn felt wetness on the backs of his hands, on his cheeks and forehead.
He turned around and sat down on the ground, hearing the engine cough and become silent.
He bowed his head in the throbbing stillness of the woods.
He didn’t look behind him.
85
Penny had a difficult time conversing with Fedderman, the way he was lying on his stomach, with half his face mashed into his hospital pillow. The nurses, with cunning expertise and Velcro restraining material, had made it impossible for him to turn over.
“Thish p’low mush have a thread count about three,” he said.
It struck Penny as odd that Feds would complain about the pillowcase’s roughness on his face rather than the holes left by the pellets that had penetrated his right back and shoulder when he’d instinctively turned away from Schueller’s shotgun. One of the pellets had almost lodged in his spine, and possibly would have paralyzed him. As it was, he should completely recover but for a peppering of scars on his back.
“I guesh you were right about the rishk factor,” Fedderman said.
Penny had been crying intermittently since hearing from Quinn that her husband had been shot. Shock had become relief, then anger, then
… something else. The crying she did now was for relief if not actual joy.
She leaned close to Fedderman. “You’re an idiot, Feds.”
He knew that tone of voice. He smiled.
“No,” she said, “ I’m the idiot. You don’t marry someone intending to change him. And now you’ve made me realize how much I’d miss you, and I’m trapped.”
“But you don’t mind?”
She kissed him. “The question doesn’t apply,” she said. “I’ve got you. We have each other. As close to forever as we can make it.”
He smiled into his pillow. “Shwell,” he said.
“I’m not going to buy a gun,” she said.
“Shwell.”
Huh?
While Enders and Coil sometimes served as legal consultants to Waycliffe College and its faculty, there wasn’t enough evidence to indict the law firm. The Waycliffe conspirators, along with mid-level Meeding Properties executives, received guilty verdicts on counts of fraud, insider trading, and impeding an investigation. They were found not guilty as accessories in all six homicides; Chancellor Schueller, in death, bore all the guilt.
Enders and Coil knew how to sweep up after their clients, and themselves.
Sarah Benham, a decorated former Marine who was in the employ of Meeding Properties to help facilitate the eminent domain case and eviction of Mildred Dash, was also convicted.
Though Sarah was a troubleshooter in Meeding Properties Security, she did in addition insure art, which was the basis for her relationship with Waycliffe College. It had led to her acting on behalf of the co-conspirators in the Meeding Properties-Mildred Dash dilemma, and to sharing in their mutually supportive lie.
While free on bail and awaiting sentencing, she was found in her bathtub with six empty martini glasses nearby and her wrists sliced.
Not only was the defendants’ legal team supremely skilled at speaking untruths without lying, they knew how to deflect. They had managed to have the recording made at Chancellor Schueller’s house declared illegally obtained and inadmissible in court.
And inaccessible to the public.
Waycliffe College would survive the storm of damaging truth and innuendo, so the respected institution could sever itself from its past.
For everyone involved, nothing was cheap
Jody was terminated at Enders and Coil before Mildred Dash’s family filed suit claiming Mildred’s death was premature and caused by Meeding Properties and the law firm harassing her in a campaign of terror to try forcing her illegal eviction.
Jody became a friend of the plaintiffs, and in her room above Quinn and Pearl in the brownstone prepared herself to testify for Mildred Dash’s family in court.
Quinn and Pearl would sit on the sofa with after-dinner drinks and listen to her, though they couldn’t quite understand what she was saying.
“It sounds as if she’s talking to herself and answering,” Pearl said.
“She is,” Quinn told her.
“Is that healthy?”
“Not for anyone who gets crossways with her.”
“Should we be worried?”
“No,” Quinn said. “She’s asking the right questions, and I suspect her answers are good ones.”
EPILOGUE
Rio de Janeiro, the present
On Corcovado Mountain, half a mile above Rio, stood a statue of Christ the Redeemer, arms spread wide as if blessing the sprawling city below. Also beneath the beneficent figure of Jesus, Daniel Danielle reclined on a padded lounger on his sun-washed fifth-floor balcony, facing the city’s edge and the beach near Grande Tijuca. Daniel preferred these beaches near the favelas, where many of Rio’s thousands of homeless street kids swarmed.
Street children were a problem in Rio, but not for Daniel Danielle. They were a savvy, hard-bitten lot, but they were also made vulnerable by lack of time on earth. Prey for predators. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these children join the disappeared each year. No one seemed to notice. No one seemed to care. No one searched for them. The poor greatly outnumbered the rich in Rio, and there was little to spend on the welfare of wild children.
Daniel placed his espresso on the round tiled table next to his lounger and put on his sunglasses. They had prescription lenses, and he enjoyed sitting in the late morning sun and reading the latest edition of the New York Times. The paper had certainly been interesting lately, but now that was over and he knew the news would be more mundane.
At least for a while.
Occasionally Daniel felt the urge to travel, to return to the U.S. and take up his old hobby. But he knew that truthfully it was safer to indulge in it elsewhere. Perhaps, ideally, where he was.
A warm breeze played over his bare legs. He removed his prescription glasses and put on plain tinted ones, the better to observe the beach. He smiled, as he did most mornings. He knew he had much to smile about. Life was going smoothly. His investments using stolen money had performed admirably. The problems of the common man were for others. What he needed he had in abundance.
