Echoes (18 page)

“Well, hell.”

“Exactly.” Callie tried to squirm out of his grasp, but he hung on to her. “Get your guys working on the Lewis clinic stuff. Call when you get something set up.” He flipped the phone shut, shoved it back into his pocket, and, taking Callie by the shoulders, turned her to face him. Her dark eyes brimmed with tears.

“This is good news,” he said, the ferocity of his own words surprising him. “You don't want to be related to a mass murderer.”

“I don't want to be related to a con man who sold black-market babies or a serial rapist, either,” she replied, shrugging him off and stalking across the room, “but no one asked me.” She plopped down on the sofa and looked up at him. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“I wish I had an easy answer. It's late. Maybe Nash's night owls will have something for us in the morning.”

“I don't think sleep is on the agenda.” She glanced away, then back at him, then patted the cushion next to her. He accepted the invitation. “You told me you grew up in Atlanta,” she said once he was seated. “What was your family like?”

“Small. Most of my life, it was just me and my mom. My dad couldn't hack the responsibility of a wife and kid, and hit the road when I was four. He sent money off and on for a couple of years, then disappeared altogether.”

“That must have been tough.”

“For my mother, it probably was. But most of my neighborhood was single-parent families, with mothers who cleaned houses like mine or worked as cocktail waitresses or worse. Many of the guys I ran with had never met their fathers, so I had it pretty good.” Jesus, he sounded like a sap. What was it about this woman that made him open up like a fucking book?

“Your mother, is she still alive?”

“No. She died while I was in the Army. Massive stroke.” It still hurt to think about her dying alone with him half a world away, but the doctors had assured him she hadn't suffered.

“I'm sorry.” Callie touched the back of his hand, and he flipped it, twining his fingers with hers.

“Why the sudden interest in my parents?” He figured he knew the answer, but it would be better for her to admit it herself.

***

Callie stared down at their hands, her pale, small fingers meshed with his large, brown ones. How could she explain to him what she didn't even understand herself? Since her father's death, she'd felt unmoored, adrift. The discovery of the picture had compounded the sensation, and the events of the past several days . . .

“I'm not sure I know who I am.”

“Of course you do. You're Calliope Elizabeth Pearson. You've lived all over the world and speak, what, four languages? You share a house with a chef named Erin and write articles for travel magazines. Nothing about you has changed. Your biological family is just a little different from what you believed.”

“That biological family doesn't frighten you at all? I guess Mark Lewis isn't technically a rapist, but he certainly inseminated a lot of unwilling women, and he obviously passed along his bad genes to Ed Steele.”

“Did he? I'm no scientist. I can't say definitively there's no genetic component to evil. In fact, I'm pretty sure there is one; one bad seed in a family of great people—what other cause is there? I saw it all the time in Narcotics. But biology isn't destiny. Humans are capable of tremendously unselfish acts, and there's no biological reason for them. Robin Cory, Deborah and Diane Masters—they were Lewis's kids, too, and they contributed to charity projects that benefited hundreds, even thousands of people.

“You were the one who said Ephraim Steele traded in his faith for profit. Doesn't it make sense he'd raise a kid without a conscience, even if that kid wasn't biologically predisposed not to give a damn about anyone else?”

“I suppose.” Callie took a deep breath, tried to let Mac's assurance release some of her tension.

“And John Lewis, whose parentage we know nothing about—though I'm certain Nash is digging into it even as we speak—could have turned out completely normal if he hadn't been raised by Mark Lewis.”

“His mother committed suicide.” Remembering his telling her so, she realized she might have spent an evening looking through family scrapbooks with a killer. Shouldn't she have been able to tell?

“Yeah. Nikki told me about it. The first Mrs. Mark Lewis locked herself in their garage with the car running. Makes you wonder if she suddenly realized what she had married.”

John Lewis hated to sweat, avoided it whenever possible, but he was sweating now. Luckily, the man on the other end of the phone couldn't see the moisture beading around his hairline or smell the fear and frustration oozing from his pores.

“I told you, she doesn't know anything. That picture was all she had. There was no need for your stunt in Grand Case. You brought the fucking gendarmes down on me for no reason whatsoever. They're crawling all over the hotel. I don't dare move the crates. Not now.”

“You imagine I care about some provincial French law enforcement? Do you have any idea who helped your brother-in-law evade us? Who took him to the US and hid him there?” The smooth, cultured voice was sharp with fury.

A drop of sweat rolled down John's face. “Why don't you tell me?”

“Are you familiar with Harp Security Enterprises?”

“No.”

“Then you are a fool. Dwight Harper would like nothing more than to get a man inside my organization. He and his private army, recruited from your country's three-letter agencies, have caused me no end of trouble. I've spent countless dollars, missed out on lucrative opportunities, lost good men, all because of him. And you, you bring him right to my door. Dwight Harper served with Brody in the Army. You should have known that.”

“Don't lay this on me. Your man in New York was supposed to take Callie Pearson out of the equation before she even met Brody.” John twitched, imagining Callie's body going up in flames. How could he have ordered such a thing? What a horrible waste it would have been, especially since he'd had to dispose of Nicole's body before he could get much out of it. The drugs, the booze, the freezing, something had damaged her beyond utility. And Callie, Callie was the youngest of the girls. She would have been his father's greatest creation. With every day, he was more certain she held the cure.

“And he has seen the error of his ways.”

John shivered at the implied threat, again thankful Henry Falcone couldn't see him. John had beaten the odds for almost twenty years, using a playboy socialite persona to keep his reputation as clean as his hands were dirty, but Falcone, though close to him in age, had been in the game twice as long and more than twice as deep.

At fifteen, John had overheard a conversation between Mark and Ava Lewis that gave him his first clue as to the source of his father's wealth. He'd only had vacations to search, so it had taken three years to find Mark Lewis's secret records, but the payoff had been more than worth the effort. His respect for Lewis—lost upon discovering that his mother had conned Lewis into marriage by claiming another, far less respectable man's baby was his, which she'd told her son in a fit of drunken regret when he was seven—returned. That admiration had grown with the realization that Mark Lewis had manipulated his first wife into committing suicide when her drinking and wild moods had threatened to become an embarrassment.

Upon graduating high school, John had insisted on inclusion in all aspects of his father's business. He'd gone to college for hotel management but had spent his summers at the Lewis fertility clinic in Miami. Between the two, he acquired a firm grasp on both international finance and the psychology of victimization. He could smell desperation whenever it entered his orbit, and never hesitated to take advantage of it. By twenty-five, he'd amassed a small fortune, carefully secreted in offshore banks, by selling drugs through the clinic behind Mark Lewis's back.

But after a while, running the clinic's illegal sideline became too easy. No one suspected such an upstanding citizen, and John became restless. He'd been searching for something to bring the heady taste of risk back into his life when a fire swept through the property in 2001. Like most people, Mark Lewis was underinsured. He sent John out to find new financing, but traditional investors had no interest in the kind of terms Mark Lewis—who insisted on retaining control of the hotel—was willing to offer.

John had tasted failure for the first time, and in the quiet wretchedness of it he could hear his mother's voice and her laughter. She expected him to come to a bad end. She sneered at his pathetic attempts to save his father and the legacy they had built together.

You're no better than your father. And I don't mean that shit with his fancy car and his fancy degree. I mean your real father. You know what he was? He was a high school football coach. I screwed his brains out the night after I lost my virginity to your precious daddy. He was a total loser, your biological father. He fucking cried afterwards. Said he had nothing to offer me. Like what? Marriage? He was already married. That's why I fucked him; his wife was my English teacher and she was a bitch. He was nothing. Nothing. Just like you're going to be. You're going to lose that goddamned hotel, and I am going to laugh and laugh and laugh
.

Which was how John had come to an agreement with Henry Falcone.

For more than ten years now, Falcone had been paying to use the Paradis's private docks, its storage facilities, and the occasional bungalow to conduct his business under the aegis of the Lewises' sterling reputation. The relationship provided numerous benefits to both men, but the hotel was John's, and he'd always considered himself in charge of the operation.

Until today.

“Look,” he said, forcing a conciliatory note into his voice. “Mistakes were made, obviously. But Calliope Pearson's no threat to you.”

He'd asked Falcone for help to eliminate a few threats to the Lewis estate, claiming that undiscovered heirs endangered their business dealings. Falcone had lent him a hit man for the Masters sisters and another to blow up Callie's house. Thank goodness that one had failed.

“You assured me your sister's husband wasn't a threat.”

“He wasn't. Isn't.” At the angry silence on the other end of the phone, he rushed on, the next words tasting foul. “I could have been wrong about that. But you never told me to look for connections to Harp Security. I never even heard of them.” Falcone growled, and John pushed on. “Nothing ties you to me. Nothing. We've made certain of it. So relax. Even if Callie Pearson manages to figure out what my father was up to, she couldn't connect it to you. Hell, she couldn't even prove her own paternity. You have nothing to worry about, regardless of what friends Mac Brody may have.”

Still, John would be happier if Callie were under his control. He'd enjoyed killing Robin Cory even more than planning the deaths of the Steeles and Mark and Ava Lewis. Doing the deed himself had been so much more fulfilling. Nicole's death, hurried and completely contrary to his plan, had been less than satisfying. Not that he liked killing people. He wasn't a monster, after all. He just preferred to solve problems in the most efficient way possible.

And while Callie Pearson was a solution, she was also a problem. Not to Falcone—he hadn't lied about that—but to the Lewis family name and therefore to John. If Brody had the kind of resources Falcone implied he did, Callie could turn over some rocks John would rather remained undisturbed before providing him with a permanent solution.

“If there's nothing to worry about,” said Falcone, his ominously slick tone dragging John back to the conversation, “you should be able to deliver my merchandise.”

Falcone's merchandise. Two hundred pounds of explosives, six grenade launchers, and three crates of grenades, along with one locked silver suitcase, all stored in a hidden four-foot-by-six-foot alcove John had built into the wine cellar during the postfire renovations. He was damned proud of that room. He'd hired an architect from Paris to design two plans for the wine cellar, one with it and one without. John had filed the plans for the cellar without the extra space but given his contractor the set that included it. Both the contractor, a local, and the architect, had died in unfortunate accidents—a hit-and-run and a mugging—within months after the project was completed. And thanks to Falcone, those tasks had been undertaken by men with no connection whatsoever to either John or the hotel.

“Maybe in a few days. I told you, the place is infested with gendarmes.”

“Thursday night.”

“Jesus, Falcone, you're not listening to me.”

“You have your priorities; I have mine. Eduard will be by Thursday night at the customary time. I expect you to have the arrangements made.” Falcone hung up, and John slammed the phone into the cradle. What the fuck was he supposed to do now?

He stalked over to the window and looked out over the midnight landscape. Past the driveway, a path wound toward the sea. His little yacht, a weekend cruiser named
Espresso
, was docked at the pier extending out into the water there. He had forty-eight hours to take it over to the Paradis docks and transfer the items from the cellar, then bring the boat back. Between three and four on Friday morning, Falcone's men would remove the merchandise.

Normally, John threw big parties when he had to move product for Falcone, either at his home or at the hotel, so boats would cluster along the shoreline. It was part of the logic behind expanding the hotel operations: the more people who came and went, the less suspicious any activity would seem. But this had been an emergency shipment. Falcone needed it to disappear for a couple of weeks when the original deal had gone wrong. He'd shown up with it two days after Nikki's death, reserving a bungalow for one of his men without advance warning.

Too many damned torches to juggle. John settled behind his desk and reached underneath for the button that would unlock the secret compartment where he kept his journal. Smoothing his fingers over the fine, leather cover, the uneven edges of the handmade paper, he let a plan begin to take shape in his head. He drew a fountain pen from the display case on the desk and began to write, setting out what he needed to complete his strategy. Once he had finished, he picked up the phone to call Falcone back. He was going to require assistance.