Downfall (9 page)

T
HE BEST-SELLING BOOKS
had paid for the quiet, big house in the woods, for the horse idling in the sunshine, for the privacy. Janice Keene parked the rental car a half mile away, in the heavy, thick shade of the pines, and started to hike through the woods. She kept the backpack squarely on her shoulders.

She’d worn jeans, boots with the imprints sanded so any lifted prints would confuse the brand identification by the forensics people, and a heavy shirt and sleeveless vest. The backpack carried the eyedropper bottle of poison, her suppressor-capped Glock, a bottle of water. She kept the water bottle in a separate compartment in the backpack; she didn’t want it near the poison.

The best-selling books. Janice had read them all. She could see the woman’s house now, nestled in a curve of creek, sentinel pines standing tall. The air felt fresh and cool against her skin.
Diana would like a walk in these woods
, she thought,
as long as she had her designer pants and her fancy boots and a cute guy and a hot latte at the end of the hike.

Janice shoved Diana out of her thoughts; there was no room for her daughter in her brain right now. She stopped a quarter mile away from the house. She felt winded and sick. When she got home, she’d have to rest more. She could feel the snake of the cancer in her, she imagined, twining around muscles and nerves and bones, settling into its dark roost. Two serpents in her life: Belias and this cancer. She leaned against rough bark.

The stone house, a thin curl of smoke rising from its chimney. The house that truth built, Barbara Scott had claimed in a cover interview in
Vanity Fair
.

Janice headed down the hill toward the house.

There were no visitors as of late yesterday evening, no one else living at the house. She’d watched the famous author entertaining a pair of old college friends for the past two days, hoping they’d be gone by the weekend. But now Barbara Scott was alone. She’d even seen the woman come out a half hour ago in the dark of the predawn, tend to the horse, walk it for exercise, her lips moving through the lenses of Janice’s binoculars, either chatting to herself or to her horse.

Barbara Scott was one of those authors who looked exactly like their photos on the book jackets or in the electronic end pages: long black hair, a narrow face, toffee-brown eyes. She looked taller than Janice; she wore a plaid shirt, untucked, and faded jeans. On her book jackets she wore a suit that made her look intimidating, like she might fire you ten seconds after she hired you because you were already lagging. She’d written on her blog that she was behind schedule on her next book, and Janice thought an author running late on a book would probably tend to isolate herself so she could finish the project and get it to impatient editors.

So she would be alone. That would make this so much easier. She wondered what the new book was about. She wondered if the new book was why Barbara Scott had come to Belias’s attention.

She assumed there was an alarm system in the house. Probably, with a wealthy and somewhat famous woman living out here alone (she’d researched her target; Barbara Scott’s kids were grown, the husband long buried, and no steady boyfriend in the picture).

She reached the porch. She’d come in on the south side of the house, as Barbara Scott had posted pictures on her blog of her view from her writing office, and Janice therefore knew it was on the north side of the house. Amazing what little details people shared with the world, without ever realizing their importance.

She stepped onto the porch. She moved to the front door, and the wind rose and a rocking chair, caught in the gust, creaked. Janice felt her heart jump into her mouth.

This never got easier. Never.
Do it for Diana. Do it for a good life for your child
.

She tried the door. Locked. She knelt and she slipped two lockpicks into the knob. Forty seconds later the lock gave. Then she worked on the dead bolt’s lock, adding a long hook to the picking arsenal. Three more minutes and she heard the bolt slide back into its unlocked position.

Deep breath. Her hand closed on the gun’s grip. She would only use the gun if forced. She needed to make it look like natural causes; the poison would take care of that. She didn’t know where Barbara Scott was in the house, and she didn’t know if she was armed. Surely, with the enemies the woman had made in her writing career, she was prepared for trouble. Janice had heard of crime fiction authors who kept guns in their offices. Always best to assume the worst.

She opened the door, she slipped inside. No pinging noise of an alarm system, but she could see a system’s keypad. So Barbara Scott didn’t keep it activated when she was home.

The entrance foyer had a rich hardwood floor. The left side opened into a large den, with a stunning river rock fireplace, walls lined with bookshelves, the shelves full of hardbacks. Their even rows were broken by photographs: Barbara Scott with her grown kids or with famous people. Not the ones she’d made her fortunes savaging, of course.

Gun out and leveled, Janice stepped into the den. She heard nothing in the house, but she knew Barbara Scott was here. The car was still in the parkway, a grand red Suburban.

The photos of Barbara Scott with movie stars, with senators, with leaders of industry. They all looked slightly frightened, their smiles forced, as if hoping Barbara Scott wasn’t going to turn the force of her pen against them. Like having a photo with her was a totem of protection.

Janice thought,
There’s only one protection in this world, and his name’s Belias
.

She stopped, listened. She could still hear the calm whisper of the wind; windows were open somewhere. It was a clear and pleasant morning and no reason not to let in the fresh air.

But she didn’t hear Barbara Scott.

Silently, on her sanded boots, she moved through the den, into a small hallway that led to a guest room, empty, and then to a kitchen. The kitchen was large, granite countertops, a high-end steel refrigerator. Remains of breakfast in the sink. A coffeemaker, with the warming light lit red, the pot empty and cooling on the counter. Next to it a saucer filled with torn pink packets of artificial sweetener, a stained spoon, little dried puddles of coffee. Looked like the coffee setup of a writer blasting toward a deadline.

The view out the kitchen window was very similar to the view Barbara Scott posted on her blog of the inspiring view from her office. Janice glanced upward toward the ceiling. She almost imagined she could hear fingers striking a keyboard, the clicking march of words appearing on a screen.

She turned and she went up the stairs. The stairs were steep; a fall down them would be a suitable accident. If not, then the poison. If there was still coffee in the pot, she could have dosed it and hid in the house and waited for the woman to drink the fatal cup. She had to be sure the job was done. You did not fail Belias, since he did not fail you.

On the staircase were framed jackets, blown up, of Barbara Scott’s brutal best sellers.
The Unmaking of a President
, the book that had elevated her from an academic at a small liberal arts college and rocketed her into the national spotlight.
The Hollow Men
, her incisive follow-up that dissected the incompetency of three American business leaders, leading to their downfall.
Unkind
, her correctly titled exposé of the country’s foremost tabloid publisher and online gossip site owner, who had to face his own mortifying embarrassments when Barbara Scott was through with him. And more. Six books in eight years—all lauded, all huge best sellers, all using research and dirt that went far deeper than what most writers could manage.

The innermost secrets of the powerful.

The supposedly untouchable.

But Barbara Scott prodded them, dragged them, wrenched them into the light from the deepest shadows.

Janice wondered what she had found out about Belias. Why else would he want her dead?

At the top of the stairs, the hallway ran left and right.

She went to the right. An open door that showed another guest room. A closed door down the hall from it.

Janice moved to the door. Listened. She could barely hear the soft, infrequent click of a keyboard.

Would the desk face the window? Yes. What had Barbara Scott confessed on her writer’s blog:
The book is late because I keep looking at the mountains.
So the desk would face the window. The littlest things people confessed online could be helpful to a knowing eye like Janice’s.

Janice slowly eased open the door.

The study was big and comfortable. More bookshelves jammed casually with hardcovers and paperbacks shoved in pell-mell, stacks of printed manuscripts, awards on the top shelves. Colored sticky notes stuck out from the pages of books like captured rainbows. A huge window lay directly in front of her, and in front of the window and its stunning view sat a broad oak desk, with an open laptop attached to a huge screen, and a woman—Barbara Scott, her long trademark black hair down past her shoulders. She wore a denim shirt and her hands, for a moment, weren’t typing.

Janice raised the gun and centered it on the back of the woman’s head.

She told herself,
Maybe this is why Belias wants her dead. Maybe she’s writing about him. About one of us. About all of us. Maybe she knows about the network. Just put the gun to her head and force her to drink the poison, and you’re done.

The hesitation changed everything for Janice Keene, because then Barbara Scott said, “Well, I do understand your point, Nina. I do. But I’m trying to do what’s right for the structure of the book.”

Janice froze. No one else in the room. Barbara Scott wasn’t holding a phone.

Then Barbara’s head tilted slightly, she typed a few keystrokes. “Well, yes, I could move the section on the financial investors up a few chapters…yes…but maybe we could break it into two shorter chapters…I don’t want to give away too much too early…”

Janice couldn’t shoot her while she was on the phone. She wondered if Barbara Scott could see her, standing absolutely still, in the window’s reflection, a ghost against the mountain looming in the distance.

“Yes…ha, that’s why you’re such a good editor. Uh-huh…” And Barbara got up, brushing her hair back, and turning her head slightly as she studied a chapter printout on the corner of the desk, scribbled a note in red pen. Janice could see the silver of an earpiece in her ear, the soft gleam of its lit blue light.

And Barbara Scott sensed her presence and turned. She looked at Janice, her eyes going wide, her mouth a cold, wide O of surprise.

Janice fired. The suppressor hissed. The bullet caught Barbara Scott in the center of her forehead, and she didn’t scream, but she collapsed onto the soft throw rug in front of her desk. She lay still.

Janice knelt by the body and she pushed the lit blue light on the earpiece with her gloved hand. The light faded, the call ended. Like Barbara Scott’s life. She checked the wrist, the throat, felt the silence.

She looked at the laptop screen. A document front and center, red boxes of comments and annotations in the right margin.
Barbara
Scott’s latest book. It appeared to be about the financiers of Wall Street. She untethered the laptop from the cords of printers and monitor and tucked it under her arm. She dug out the prepaid pink phone Belias had given her and dialed.

He answered immediately. But he sounded as if she’d woken him. It was strange to think of him…sleeping. Or eating. Or performing human activities.

“It’s me,” Janice said. “She’s done.”

“Very good.” He sounded exhausted. Not that pleased. Maybe he was having an off day.

“I had to shoot her when she was on the phone with her editor; she spotted me. But she didn’t scream.”

Barbara Scott’s cell phone began to ring; it played a sample of the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Nausea gripped Janice; she and the woman she just killed shared a favorite band. The phone’s screen announced
NINA ROSENBERG
and a number with a New York area code.

“Her editor’s calling back.”

“Don’t answer. Don’t worry.”

“Do you want me to take her laptop?”

“Why would I want that?” He gave off a crazy little snicker that made her blood chill. He was either insane or brilliant, and she could never decide which. Could you be both?

“Because…because I thought you must want her dead because of the book she’s writing.”

“Oh. No. Thank you. Thoughtful of you.”

So why did you make me kill one of my favorite authors, Belias?
she wondered. “What do you want me to do?”

“Well, since you had to kill her with a bullet, burn the house down, Janice.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I think my instructions were fairly plain.”

“All right.”

Barbara Scott’s cell phone quit ringing. Pausing to leave a voice mail, Janice guessed.

“Call me when that’s done.”

“All right,” she said, and she clicked off the pink phone.

She picked up the dead woman’s cell phone and listened to Nina Rosenberg’s voice mail: “Hey, Barbara, I think we got disconnected. Give me a call back. I’m in my office.” She did not sound worried or anxious. Janice left that phone on the floor next to Barbara Scott’s body. No more arguments over the structure of the book. Nina could do what she liked.

In the garage she found two gallon jugs of gasoline. When she went back inside the house, the main house phone was ringing, the answering machine kicking in, and as she splashed gasoline on the books and the wooden floors, she heard a voice say, “Hey, Barbara, it’s Nina. Is everything okay? We got disconnected, but I guess you know that, and I thought I’d try you back in case it was your cell phone that died.”
No, it wasn’t the cell phone that died
, Janice thought. “Hope I didn’t make you mad with the suggestions. Call me.”

Janice spread the gasoline throughout the downstairs and heavily in Barbara Scott’s study. She threw a match she found in the bathroom down in the puddle in the study, and the gas-soaked rug burst upward in a fiery fist. She ran downstairs and did the same in the den. The
whomp
of fire was so intense she felt the heat like a slap. She ran on to the kitchen and turned on the gas stove. Then she crawled through the closest open window. It was a wide, broad porch and she started to run, and she was holding the horse’s reins when the blast heaved the roof into the air, collapsing back onto the burning innards.