TailSpin (42 page)

Sherlock’s cell vibrated in her jacket pocket. She tensed, but managed not to move. If there was only some way she could open her cell phone, but she couldn’t. Not yet. Was it Dillon? Had he tried before, while she was unconscious? If he did, he had to be worried.

“You might as well drag them into the living room, Stef, get ready to go. Quincy, make sure the windows are shut and the drapes pulled.”

Quincy asked, his voice contemptuous, “Tell me, Stefanos, when did you last use this hidden bordello of yours?”

Stefanos said, sounding amused, “A good week now, Quincy, a good week. You know you love the decor, don’t be shy about it.”

Being dragged about thirty feet into the living room hurt, but that was all right; it wasn’t as bad as the alternative. Rachael’s stomach ached from the blow from Quincy’s foot. She looked over at Sherlock, who lay on her back, her eyes closed, and, it seemed to Rachael, barely breathing. Then Sherlock’s eyes opened and she blinked in the bright light. They weren’t at Cullifer’s office or at his house. They were in a bungalow that indeed resembled a bordello, just as Quincy had said—Stefanos Kostas’s hideaway for his many mistresses?

The living room walls were covered with flocked red velvet wallpaper, gold brocade draperies over the window. They were lying on a Persian carpet beside four chaise longues and large deep chairs.

It was tacky, Rachael thought, and called out, “I’m very thirsty. Could I have some water, please?”

She was ignored.

Sherlock said, “You poisoned Greg Nichols, didn’t you? You didn’t trust him anymore?”

Stefanos threw back his head and laughed. “You were awake the whole time we were talking, weren’t you? Well, it doesn’t matter. Actually, Nichols planned how to kill his boss. He approached us to talk about the senator. He was more than willing to buy in since he didn’t want to go to jail with the senator, have his own life ruined. I went along for the ride since Nichols already knew everything he had to do to make it look like an accident. Then the fool lost it after you and Agent Crowne went to see him, Rachael. You must have really scared him. He whined how everything was crashing down, and he knew we were all going to jail. He wanted to leave town. He wanted money, can you believe that? Well, he left town all right, didn’t he?”

Laurel walked to her husband, put her arms around him, and kissed his cheek. “That was well done, Stef.”

Stef?
Laurel called her philandering husband
Stef
?

His arms went around her. “It will be all right,
matia mou,
” Stefanos said, and kissed her hair. “I always snip loose threads.”

“And why not?” Laurel said, eyeing both of them impartially. “Does everyone agree? We can’t have an FBI agent disappear. Agent Savich would never let that go, never. It would have been hard enough to have Rachael disappear. Our only choice now is an auto accident, fitting, I think, particularly for Rachael.”

Quincy nodded.

Stefanos stepped away from his wife and pulled a small blunt-nosed .38 from his jacket pocket. “Ladies, we will untie your feet. You will stand up and we will go out to Agent Sherlock’s car. You needn’t concern yourselves about anything else.” He turned to his wife. “I believe we’ll drive to those cliffs near where Rachael’s father died. There’s never much traffic there, even this time of day.”

“Yes, that’s good. Let Brady help,” Laurel said.

Quincy said, “Brady must have slipped out, the puking little coward.”

“No matter,” Stefanos said, and smiled at Rachael and Sherlock. “We don’t have to worry about Brady. He has a very strong sense of self-preservation.”

SIXTY

D
illon shut MAX’s top and rose. He said, “Excuse me, sir, but Agent Crowne and I have to go. There’s trouble.”

He and Jack were halfway to the conference room door when Maitland called out, “But, Savich, where are you going? What happened?”

“Sherlock’s in trouble,” Savich said over his shoulder, never slowing. “MAX helped me track down her cell phone GPS coordinates.”

“But how do you know she’s in trouble?”

There was no answer because Savich and Jack were gone. Savich roared out of the Hoover Building garage, only to hit the afternoon traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Porsche preferred to fly, but Savich also knew how to skim around other cars, slip in and out whenever there was a sliver of an opening. Too many people, Savich thought, and turned onto Seventh Street and picked up some speed as they passed the National Mall. He caught Pennsylvania Avenue again, heading toward the Potomac, and crossed the John Philip Sousa Bridge at a crawl, but was soon speeding north on 295, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway still light with commuters.

“Looks like we’re heading to Hailstone,” Savich said. “Eighteen minutes, if traffic stays light and the cops stay away.”

“I can’t believe she and Rachael are at Stefanos’s mansion. Why? How’d they get from Rachael’s house to Hailstone, Maryland?”

“We’ll find out. Jack, have one of our people check out Rachael’s house, see if her Charger and Sherlock’s Volvo are there. Is your seat belt fastened?” There was a break in traffic and Savich let the Porsche hit one hundred miles an hour, smooth as a slide of silk.

Jack nodded and used his cell phone.

A clear stretch ahead. Savich hit the hammer. The Porsche glided to 110, passed a speeding Cadillac. Savich saw the guy’s white face flash by.

A black Ferrari danced with them for a mile or two, then let them go, Savich smoothly pulling around it. The driver sent Savich a look of surprise and a thumbs-up.

Traffic thickened up and the Porsche growled back down to sixty. “They got both Rachael and Sherlock, Savich, you know they did. But how? Sherlock’s more careful than the Secret Service.”
What are they going to do to them
? But he didn’t ask that, his jaw locked so tight he couldn’t get the words out. “Why now? In the middle of the day? It’s a huge risk. What happened to make them move now?”

The Porsche ate up the miles. Savich said, “Jack, I’ve never believed that people like Laurel Kostas commit murder based on strong emotions. Everything has happened so quickly, we never really thought this through. I don’t buy they murdered the senator because he was going to talk, even harder to believe they were trying to murder Rachael because she was going to confess what her father did. It simply isn’t enough of a motive. And then even after she’s with us and they know we must know everything, they still tried to get to her, broke into her house. It doesn’t make sense.”

Jack said slowly, “Okay, if the guy who broke into the house wasn’t there to kill her, then why was he there?”

Savich said, “Money.”

Jack said, his eyes locked on the highway ahead, at the blur of cars, “All right, something to do with money. But what?”

“I have a feeling we’re going to find out right now.”

The Porsche’s sexy female GPS voice told them the Hailstone exit was in 3.2 miles. “Good, good,” Savich said like a mantra. “Almost there. We’ll make it in a couple of minutes.”

Savich took the exit in a tight, controlled turn. After another right turn onto Nimere Avenue into the town of Hailstone, he said, “Rachael said her father left her a third of his estate, including the company stock and the house.” He smacked his palm on the steering wheel. “Why is that worth so much to them?”

“Maybe it’s about control of the Abbott empire,” Jack said.

The Porsche took a left on Clapton Road as smooth as spreading butter, doing sixty.

Jack said, “Wait, the Kostas mansion is back to the right. Where are we going?”

The GPS announced the location was 0.5 miles ahead.

“I don’t know,” Savich said.

An old gray Chrysler pulled onto the road directly in front of the Porsche.

SIXTY-ONE

L
aurel said, “Just a moment, Stef.” She looked down at Rachael. “Tell me why you didn’t make the senator’s grand confession for him last night when you had the perfect chance.”

Quincy said, “That’s clear enough, Laurel. She finally realized she’d be considered a traitor to her father, and her idea for that damned foundation she wants to run would be trashed.”

Keep them talking, keep them talking.
Rachael saw it in Sherlock’s eyes, and so she said, “No, none of that. Fact is, Aunt Laurel, I decided that only Jimmy could make public a revelation with such far-reaching consequences. His decision, no one else’s.”

“Are you telling the truth?” Quincy asked her.

“I’m lying here at your feet. Why would I lie?”

Suddenly tears appeared in Laurel’s eyes. The stone-cold prison matron was suddenly remorseful about murdering her brother?
Tears?
Rachael stared at her. What was going on here?

Laurel said, “It means I didn’t fail. And do you know, I’d already accepted that I had? I despised you so much, Rachael. Daddy would never have forgiven me if you had spoken out. Never. He believed there was never any excuse for failure.”

Daddy? Her father? That profane old man who took my father from my mother?
But he was dead, months and months dead, dead before they murdered Jimmy.
Daddy
?

“That old bastard,” Quincy said. “How did he even find out what Jimmy did? I didn’t have a clue until Jimmy told us.” Quincy banged his fist against his palm.

“Dammit, he should have told me, too. I was his loyal son. I stayed, didn’t go haring off to the damned Senate. I was the son who did whatever he asked. Damned old bastard.”

Rachael and Sherlock barely breathed.

“Calm yourself, Quincy. Daddy never told me how he found out about it,” Laurel said. “I do know he had Jimmy followed now and again, had detectives check on him. He liked to know where all the pieces were on the chessboard—you know that was always his way. Plus, he was very angry that Jimmy ignored all his ideas for new legislation.”

“Stop your whining, Quincy,” Stefanos said. “It is really unattractive, doesn’t go well at all with your patrician image.”

“Shut your trap, you suck-up—”

Stefanos laughed. “Is that envy I hear?”

Quincy shouted, “Envy of what? That the old man invented your image to suit himself and his own purposes, and you let him?”

Stefanos said, “I always thought it was one of your father’s better ideas.”

Sherlock was working the knots at her wrists.
Please, let them keep talking, let them thrash it all out, go for each other’s throats, for all I care. Three more minutes, that should do it.
She worked until her wrists were raw and she felt the sting and wet of her own blood but it didn’t matter. They’d found her ankle holster and taken her Lady Colt, but they hadn’t searched her inner jacket pocket with its single Kleenex and her Swiss Army knife.

Quincy said, “Yeah, right, making a fool of Laurel for fifteen years! I never liked it. I knew what people were saying about you behind their hands. But Father used to laugh when he’d hear gossip about your mistresses, about your barhop ping, your partying with hookers in this little bungalow, not even five minutes from where you lived with my sister. Did you laugh with him, Laurel?”

She said, her voice light, “I’ve always loved the theater.”

Sherlock felt her cell vibrate again. Dillon, it had to be Dillon. He’d come, she knew he’d come.

Stefanos turned to Rachael, smiled down at her. “You have no idea what he’s talking about, do you?”

“I only know you’re a philandering jerk.”

Laurel said, “But that’s only what everyone was supposed to believe. Stefanos’s reputation as a womanizer—that was my father’s idea. He got a real kick out of building that reputation for my dear Stef.”

Stefanos picked it up. “It worked to our advantage, what with business associates believing I was nothing more than a simple-minded playboy he’d bought for Laurel. I got so many of those old jackasses to invite me to their weekend retreats where they paraded their mistresses about, talked openly about the women they were screwing, about this business expansion or that merger. They couldn’t imagine I was a threat to them. All the booze, the sex, the stupid schemes. I recorded all of it, even managed to videotape some of it when those old codgers came over to my own little place here. They loved all the red velvet. They never saw the cameras. The old man was very pleased. He enjoyed watching the films I made.”

Laurel said with a smirk. “Business took a marked upswing.”

“I haven’t done so much of that now that the old man’s dead,” Stefanos said. “And I’ll admit it was getting tiresome.”

Laurel said, “Before Daddy became really ill that last time, he told me what Jimmy had done. He asked me to promise I would never allow anyone to find out. He was worried because he said Jimmy had this tender girl’s conscience, he hated to say it out loud since Jimmy was his oldest son, but the truth was the truth. He’d bred a weakling. Jimmy had all our mother’s flaws. It shamed him.”

“Dammit, Laurel, our old man was nuts. You know what else? I think he turned on Jimmy when he broke away to run for the Senate. You know why—it was Jimmy’s idea, not his. He hated that he couldn’t control Jimmy, hated that Jimmy wouldn’t do what he told him to.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Laurel said. “Not now. When he was dying, he asked me again to promise, to accept it as my responsibility. And so I did.”

Quincy said, “And look where that’s led. Jimmy’s dead. Greg Nichols is dead. These two bitches will shortly be dead, and we’re fighting for our lives here.”

A lot of bodies piling up around you, aren’t there, Laurel?
Rachael held very, very still.

Stefanos looked at his wife’s white face. “The promise you made to your father was honorable, Laurel. As to what he really was, it no longer matters, just as you said. It’s only us now, and we will do what we must to survive. To win.”

Laurel said, passion thick in her voice, “Daddy mattered. He mattered more than anyone.” She walked over to Rachael and went down on her knees beside her. “After Daddy died, your mother thought she could cash in at last, make her move, and so she sent you to the senator, and that ridiculous fool decided you were a gift from the gods.”