Close Call (19 page)

Sydney

Sydney felt restless when
they got back to the townhouse that evening, something in her stirred up by listening to Emma Fewell. When Earl yapped at them and ran toward his leash, she grabbed on to the idea of a walk with relief. She didn't want to sit, didn't want to think or contemplate. A walk would be just the ticket. She was half irritated when Reese insisted on coming along.

“What kind of bodyguard would I be if I let you wander around outside alone?” Reese asked, cocking a brow. She slung her purse over her shoulder. So she'd have the gun, Sydney realized. “Besides, he's my dog.”

Resisting a sharp retort, Sydney leashed a happy Earl and the three of them turned right on the sidewalk with Earl taking the lead. One big happy, Sydney thought sourly. With twilight settling in and a breeze blowing, the temperature was more comfortable and Sydney gradually relaxed again. It was the heat making her snappy, she told herself. When they'd walked for fifteen minutes in a silence that Reese showed no inclination to break (not getting very far since Earl had to whiz on every tree, shrub, sign, lamppost, and hydrant they passed), Sydney said, “You researched Montoya's wife. Tell me about her so I know what we're walking into tomorrow.”

Shifting the purse on her shoulder, Reese said, “Father a biochemist-turned-entrepreneur, mother a homemaker and sister of Matvei Utkin. A brother in Texas and a sister in North Carolina. Wellesley grad. Met Montoya at a fundraiser for a Democratic candidate and six months later they were married. He put her through grad school and she became an architect. After a few years, she branched out to become a builder—no one seems to know where the initial stake for that came from.”

“Utkin?”

“Could be. Several profiles I scanned say her company is one of the most successful in eastern Maryland. Custom homes. She's rich in her own right, so why she sticks with Montoya, I don't know. He began screwing around on her about twenty minutes after they married, and she's put up with it all this time. I don't get the political wife ethos of ‘stand by your man no matter what kind of pond scum he is.' What self-respecting woman would do that?”

Sydney almost felt Julie Manley's presence and tripped on an uneven slab of sidewalk. George's wife had told Sydney she was keeping their marriage together because she'd made a vow, that the church had joined them and no teenage slut with daddy issues was going to separate them. She'd said that George's political career was a calling that transcended his lapse—that's what she called the almost three-year affair, a ‘lapse'—and that she wasn't going to let his sordid association with Sydney keep him from accomplishing everything she knew he could do for the American people. At the time, her words and disgust had devastated Sydney, but looking back, she wondered if Julie believed, really felt, what she was saying or if she'd scripted the speech and carefully chosen the dignified lavender suit for maximum impact. Shades of purple were mourning colors in Victorian times, Sydney knew, and she wondered if Julie was making a subtle statement about mourning her moribund marriage.

Reese's fingers snapping an inch from her nose brought her back. “Earth to Sydney. Where'd you go?”

“I'm right here,” Sydney said, pulling Earl away from a fast-food bag he was investigating. He clamped it in his jaws and carried it with him. Her cell phone rang. She answered it, hoping it would be Montoya telling her one of his staff had located her car. Listening in disbelief to the voice squawking through the phone, she said, “Where?” and “Thank you” and hung up.

“That was the police,” she told Reese. “They found my car.”

“Superb. Let's go get it.”

Sydney shook her head. “Nope. Someone hacked it up and set in on fire in the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse in Anacostia.”

Reese whistled. “I guess those KKK guys were PO'd.”

“Imminent Revelation.”

“So they run around in camos instead of bed sheets.” Prying the fast-food bag out of Earl's jaws and crinkling it into a ball, Reese shot it toward a rusted trash barrel. It swished in, startling a squirrel on the rim who fluffed his tail and chattered at them.

“Show-off.”

“If you've got it, flaunt it.” Reese grinned. “But I don't need to tell you that—you've done plenty of flaunting in your day. Even at seventeen, you had it going on, baby sister. The dress you wore to senior prom … ” She eyed Sydney's attire as if comparing it unfavorably with her former wardrobe. “You had it going on, but it looks like it got up and went.”

Sydney's hand shook slightly and the leash rippled. The media and blogosphere had been brutal about her looks when the story broke, with paparazzi sneaking photos that emphasized her cleavage and editors digging up photos of her in that low-cut, tight-fitting green prom dress and running them over and over with her date cropped out. She didn't think Reese meant to be hurtful in this instance, and she wanted to preserve their soap-bubble-thin reconnection, but she couldn't keep all the irritation out of her response. “I don't need your fashion critiques, okay? My clothes suit me fine. They fit my job, who I am.”

Reese let it go. “Who am I to judge?” She gestured to her camp shirt and khakis. “Whoever said ‘clothes make the man'—or woman, in this case—was full of shit. Earl, it's time to go back.”

Sydney
Monday, August 7

Shortly after noon on
Monday, Sydney and Reese pulled into the yard of a house under construction west of Annapolis. Sydney was driving Reese's Highlander while her sister worked on her tablet. A large sign in the yard proclaimed
Van Slyke Custom Builders
. A cement mixer trundled out of the rutted dirt driveway and workers crawled over the house like ants with hard hats.

“We're looking for Katya Van Slyke?” Sydney poked her head out the window to talk with an overalled man munching a sandwich.

“O'er dere,” he mumbled around a mouthful. He jerked his head to the left of the house.

Sydney thanked him and steered the car carefully over the deep gouges in the roadway left by construction equipment.

“Shit,” Reese exclaimed the third time they lurched into a pothole deep enough to double as a reservoir. “My ride's going to need an alignment when we get back.”

“Quit whining. At least your car's not an arsonist's wet dream.”

Reese's eyebrows soared and she chuckled. “I didn't know you had it in you, little sister. What would Connie say?”

“It's been a rough week,” Sydney groused, putting the Highlander in park and unbuckling. “That's got to be her.” She pointed toward a figure with a blond braid hanging from beneath its yellow hard hat.

They climbed out of the SUV and approached a tall woman studying a set of blueprints on the hood of a red F-250.

“Katya Van Slyke?” Sydney asked as they got closer. Fidel had warned her not to call his wife “Mrs. Montoya.” “It makes her rabid,” he'd said with a rueful note in his voice when he'd told Sydney where to find her. What did that say about their marriage?

The blonde looked up, showing ice blue eyes under pale brows, but she kept her finger on a spot on the documents. “Yes?” She looked from Sydney to Reese.

She came across like a middle-aged Viking warrior queen: six feet tall, big-boned, aloof. Sydney could easily imagine her wielding a hammer. “I'm Sydney Ellison and this is my sister, Reese Linn. Your husband said you might have a few minutes to talk to us about—”

“About this alleged assassin, yes?” Katya said, a thin smile stretching her lips.

“You don't think someone tried to kill your husband?”

She shrugged. “I think Fidel is a politician and he wants very much to win this election tomorrow. He subscribes to the ‘any publicity is good publicity' theory.”

“But he hasn't gone to the media with it, or even the police,” Sydney said.

“Yet.”

The single word hung between them.“Don't you want your husband to win?”

The woman's eyes crinkled at the corners and Sydney got the feeling she was laughing at her. “Of course I do. It's good for business. It would be better if he were a Republican, of course, from a commission standpoint—they're not as shamefaced about their conspicuous consumption as the Democrats, are they?—but being Congressman Montoya's wife nets me plenty of jobs.” She extended a hand toward the house going up behind them. “Do you know what my profit on a fifteen-million-dollar home is?”

“Enough to buy Jimmy a racehorse?” Sydney didn't know where the idea came from; it jumped out of her mouth.

“Not even close.” Katya's face shut down. “If I could, I'd buy Jimmy free of those monsters who have their hooks into him and lock him up in a recovery facility until he lost the urge to buy so much as a lottery ticket. There's one in Montana with a good reputation. But his father says he's got to live with the consequences of his decisions. Those men are going to hurt him. Matvei is … ruthless. Blood means nothing to him.”

Although Katya spoke matter-of-factly, Sydney sensed a mother's fear for her son in the slight tightening of the cords in her neck.
But Sydney found herself looking in vain for any resemblance between mother and son. Did it bother the woman to have left no physical stamp on her offspring?

“Do you think Utkin could be targeting your husband?” she asked. She stopped short of asking if Jimmy himself could be responsible.

“No one's ‘targeting' Fidel,” Katya said irritably. “So he heard a shot while he was jogging. A target shooter, a poacher, a homeowner scaring away a coyote. They are all more likely than an assassin, yes?”

“He says the bullet barely missed him.”

She shrugged, seeming to imply that Montoya might have been exaggerating. “I've told him dozens of times he shouldn't run on the roads. That's what gyms and tracks are for.”

The woman's lack of concern for her husband was unbelievable. Sydney told her about the cell phone switch and the call she'd received. Cold blue eyes locked onto hers.

“You have a history with politicians, do you not? And my husband has a weakness for attractive women.” She said it the same way she might say, “My husband likes grape jelly.”

The words stung Sydney like a cloud of mosquitoes. She slapped them away with a chop of her hand. “I am not sleeping with your husband! My fiancé was murdered by the man hired to kill your husband.”

“So you say.” The look in the blonde's eyes belied her cool tone.

“Maybe you're tired of Fidel's womanizing,” Sydney suggested, pushed to her limit. “Maybe you hired the killer to get rid of him. If he was dead, you could spend his money to bail out your gambling-addict son before he gets himself beaten to a pulp by your uncle's goons.”

“How dare you!” Katya banged her fist on the truck's hood with a loud clang. Several workers looked over and one took a step toward them, returning to his task when Reese stared him down.

“How dare
you
accuse me of sleeping with your sleazebag husband, just because I'm trying to keep him from getting killed and catch the bastard who shot my fiancé!”

The two women glared at each other over the truck's hood. Heat from the metal seeped into Sydney's hands and she realized she'd banged them down in her anger.

“Get the fuck off my job site,” Katya said, her voice low and menacing. She leaned her torso across the truck and practically growled in Sydney's face. “And stay away from my family.”

Sydney spun on her heel. Reese side-stepped with catlike agility before she could walk into her. In silence, they walked side-by-side back to the SUV.

“You were a big help back there,” Sydney said, clambering into the driver's seat and jabbing the key into the ignition.

“Didn't look to me like you needed any help,” Reese said, with a good humor that annoyed her more. “She has a longer reach, but I think you could've taken her. Interesting interview technique, by the way—pissing the subject off. I've used it myself. Of course, the object is to make the subject angry enough to say something he didn't mean to, but not so angry he takes a swing at you. It's a fine line.” Her tone suggested she could give Sydney a few pointers on needling interview subjects.

“Do you think she hired someone to kill her husband?” Sydney craned her neck to look over her shoulder as she backed up the SUV.

“I don't know, but if I were Fidel Montoya, I'd hide the scissors before I went to sleep tonight,” Reese said.

Sydney choked on a laugh despite her anger. “They're quite the dysfunctional family, aren't they?”

“Yeah, like the Menendezes were a dysfunctional family.”

She shot her sister a look as she dodged a mason with trowel and hod. “You think Jimmy hired the hit man? The Menendezes were the sons who killed their parents, right?”

“Yeah.” Reese pulled the visor down. “I didn't mean I necessarily think Jimmy's behind the assassination attempt. He seems pretty ineffectual, but sometimes the weakest-seeming men are the most vicious when they get the chance. They take years of abuse and put-downs and use them to fuel rage like you've never seen … ”

She trailed off, and Sydney said, “You're thinking about Ruben Panetta, aren't you?”

Reese swiveled her head toward her. “You've read my books?”

Sydney cursed herself inwardly. She didn't want Reese knowing she was interested enough to have followed her career. “I might have glanced at one or two.”

Reese let it go. “Yeah, I was thinking about Panetta. He had some things in common with Jimmy Montoya. He was young—only twenty-three—when he started killing. He had a domineering father and was bullied in school. I'll bet Jimmy was bullied some. He just has that ‘kick me' aura to him. But there are big differences, too. Panetta's father raped him repeatedly from the time he was five or six, and his mother let it happen. He had a history of bed-wetting and setting fires—all classic signs of a serial killer—and there's none of that in Jimmy Montoya's dossier.”

“It's apples and oranges, right?” Sydney said, taking an exit ramp so fast that g-forces swayed Reese against the window. A detour forced them through a residential area of Annapolis streets. “Hiring a contract killer to take out your dad with filthy lucre as your motive is a far cry from being a serial killer.”

“True.” Reese was silent a moment, and then said, “When you talk to killers and victims all the time, you get to thinking that everyone is one or the other. Everyone around a killer is a victim, not just the people he actually kills. Parents, siblings, friends—they're all victims, too, to one degree or another. Panetta's sister … I have to remind myself that it's not true that everyone is a killer or a victim. Some people lead perfectly ordinary lives, hurting each other in ordinary ways, kissing and making up, working, laughing, listening to music, losing their virginity to a high school sweetheart, celebrating quinceañeras.” She gestured to a boisterous group of Latinos spilling out into the front yard they were passing, at their center a laughing teenage girl dressed in a tiered yellow gown and wearing a tiara.

“You know … ” She spoke toward the window, and Sydney had to strain to hear her. “I spent ten years witnessing war in all of its ugliness, and the last six years chronicling the lives of the sickest, most depraved men—and one woman—in the country. It's gotten so I can't get it out of my head anymore.”

A shaft of concern for her sister pierced Sydney. “Quit. Walk away.”

Tilting her head back against the seat, Reese said, “And do what? This is what I'm good at.”

“Take some time to figure it out. Go reno your house and just breathe.”

“Is that what you did?” Reese asked the question facing straight ahead, not making eye contact.

Sydney knew what her sister meant. “Not soon enough,” she said after a moment. She braked to let a gaggle of tourists and midshipmen from the Naval Academy cross the street. “Afterward, I hid in Europe. Then I married Dirk, thinking … hell, I couldn't have been thinking at all when I married Dirk.” Lights from emergency vehicles strobed ahead of them and traffic was at a total standstill, so Sydney put the SUV in park and turned to face her sister's profile.
“Nana Linn rescued me. She swooped down on me in Santa Monica—that's where
we were living while Dirk pursued his ‘acting' career—and took me home with her to Richmond. She made me get counseling and bullied me to finish my degree. Then, when I'd been with her almost a year, she gave me the keys to the cabin in West Virginia—”

“The one on Wood Lake, where we went on vacation a couple of times?” Reese looked interested.

Sydney nodded. “You told me we were swimming in fish pee and I wouldn't put my head underwater. Dad explained about dilution and threw me in off the dock.”

“It was peaceful up there,” Reese said, in a wistful voice that hinted she hadn't known peace in a while.

“It was,” Sydney agreed. “Also lonely, cold—it was winter—and just what I needed. Nana Linn told me to hike, fish, chop wood, and not think at all. The result was a kind of healing; a strengthening, I guess you'd call it. I came back knowing I wanted to start Winning Ways. Well, not Winning Ways exactly, but something like it, a nonprofit that helped women. Nana Linn hooked me up with folks who knew the ins and outs of fundraising and could pinpoint an area where there was a need. I miss her.” Her thoughts dwelled on the woman with the regal posture and the white hair always swept back in a chignon. She remembered the hands with their swollen knuckles and red nails, manicured weekly; the soft voice that somehow always made itself heard; the acerbic commentary on politics and the decline of Western culture; the surprising strength in the thin arms that would sweep her into a hug with no warning. She blinked back tears.

An ambulance maneuvered past, siren blaring, and the car in front of them chugged forward a few feet. Exhaust fumes choked the air. Sydney slipped the Highlander into gear and eased it forward.

“Solitude sounds blissful,” Reese said. “She left you that place, didn't she?”

Sydney heard the unasked question. No, not quite a question, or even a hope; more like a dawning awareness of a previously unrecognized need. “I'll give you the keys when we get home, if we ever do,” she said as the car in front of them slammed on its brakes to avoid hitting a motor scooter weaving through the halted cars. “You're welcome to stay as long as you want. I haven't been up there in a long time, so I can't vouch for the condition of the place. There's a caretaker, but—”

“Doesn't matter.” After a pause, Reese added, “Thanks.”

“You're welcome.” The moment felt too heavy, almost meaningful, and it made her squirm. “I'll bet Earl will like swimming. Just don't tell him about the fish pee.”

Reese chuckled. “He's afraid of water, the wussy, can't stand to get a bath. But he loves chasing squirrels.”

“There are plenty of those.”

In the mysterious way of traffic jams, the dam broke and suddenly they were moving.