The Agency (21 page)

I wondered if he really did find his father’s book. If he did, he probably burned it. Or hid it away where it would never see the light of day. Then he faced the challenge of creating a new
manuscript, something that would stand up to the scrutiny of experts, something that would convince a jury. Or maybe he just figured it needed to be convincing enough to scare Dorothy into settling.

And, yes, it was convincing.

From the photocopy, I could tell that it
looked
old. The manuscript was printed on what appeared to be an old dot-matrix printer with an ink cartridge that smeared and stuttered and made the text hard to read. It was probably printed on yellowed paper that had been sitting in the attic for years, too. It looked like the kind of draft copy an author would have kept some twenty years ago. Smart. If the package feels authentic, what’s inside must be genuine, too.

I wondered how Milton had gone about creating the manuscript itself. I didn’t think he was the one who wrote it. You’d have to be a writer to pull off something like that. A ghost. Someone who’s used to writing in someone else’s style and can shed skins like a chameleon. Maybe a talented but unsuccessful novelist who was willing to sell his soul to get a percentage of the fortune that Milton promised would be coming their way. It’s not an easy job. You have to make it close but not too close. You have to make it sound like the other stories that Tom Milton wrote, so anyone who read it would believe it was by the same hand. You have to deconstruct what Dorothy did and rebuild it as an earlier, rougher draft. Definitely not easy. Milton needed someone who knew what he was doing and had no integrity at all.

But, hey, he lives in New York. No problem.

We could subpoena bank records to see if Milton made a payoff, but I had a feeling he was too smart to be caught that way. I also wondered if we could subpoena his telephone records and find calls back and forth between him and Saleema. This had her fingerprints all over it. Not that I’d ever be able to prove it.

I knew who I needed to call. My father. If you’re on the losing end of a campaign of dirty tricks, the best person to ask for advice is someone who’s spent his whole life in politics. Dad has seen it all. Sex scandals. Money scandals. Vice, betrayal, perjury, deception, everything you’d expect from our governing bodies. He is the
ultimate insider and the ultimate cynic, but as a result, he knows everyone and trusts no one. If I turn him loose on David Milton, he’ll find something. I hate to ask him for help, though, because every meeting with my father is a chance to review the laundry list of my failures and disappointments. He does it so smoothly that you don’t feel like shit until later, but when it hits you just how badly you’ve turned out, you wind up eating chocolate for a week.

I decided to call him anyway.

That was the first item on my mental to-do list as I got off the plane at Heathrow. Emma tells me I’m in a world of my own sometimes, thinking about what I have to do. I would have to check in with Oliver Howard and tell him about Cruise and
Singularity.
Neither Oliver nor I is particularly religious, but if we both start praying, perhaps it will help. I also have to give Dorothy an update about David Milton, which won’t be much of an update, because the only things I know now are things I wish I didn’t know at all. I have to talk to my accountant. My lawyer. People I hate talking to unless I’m broke or under arrest, and, who knows, by next week I may be both.

I also have to decide if I’m going to pull the trigger. Leave the agency.

So really, there wasn’t much at all on my mind as I retrieved my bags and took the green line at customs. All I was expecting was a typical drizzly London morning, take a shower, go to the office, make some calls, do my thing.

Then I saw a face in the waiting crowd, and I told myself I really needed to stop making jokes, even in my head, because lately, they’ve had a way of coming true. First the corset and heels thing with Lowell. And now the idea of being arrested. The face I saw belonged to Nicholas Hadley, the detective with the gray beard and the muddy Burberry. He saw me and pushed his way toward me, and I knew the day wasn’t going to go as I had hoped.

“You really didn’t need to come all this way to greet me, Inspector,” I told him sweetly. “I was just going to hop the Piccadilly Line into the city.” I gave him my most winning smile, which wasn’t returned.

“I need to ask you some questions, Ms. Drake,” Hadley replied.

“About what?”

People really do say stupid things like that. About what? Oh, hell, maybe he wants to talk about the weather.

“About you and Lowell Bardwright,” he said.

“I think we’ve already talked about that, haven’t we?”

“Something else has come up,” Hadley told me.

“Such as?”

“Such as your fingerprints. In Mr. Bardwright’s apartment.”

I’M HOOKED ON TV
cop shows. I make sure my DVR never misses
CSI
or any of the eighteen million variations of
Law & Order
. So after years of watching Lenny Briscoe and Ed Green and Ray Curtis (thump, thump goes my heart), I know that the police like psychological warfare. You know, good cop, bad cop—that sort of thing. Lie to a suspect. Make friends with a suspect. And sooner or later, the bad guys break down and sob and confess.

For me, it started with coffee. Really bad coffee. I’m sort of a coffee snob about my Caffè Nero dark roast, and the toilet water that Nicholas Hadley poured in a white paper cup made me want to tell him I shot Kennedy. Hadley drank two cups himself without flinching.

At least he didn’t put me in a windowless room with a bare bulb dangling over my head. We sat in his office, which had a door and a window and a thousand file folders on his desk. The walls were littered with terrorist alerts and pictures of his wife and two kids.
His wife didn’t look like any of the terrorist photos. I’m not sure about his oldest kid.

If I sound cavalier and sarcastic, there’s a reason for it. I’m innocent. I never slept with Lowell, I never went to his apartment, and I certainly never helped him play a game of hangman’s fellatio. I didn’t do a damn thing, so when Hadley tells me he found my fingerprints in Lowell’s apartment, I know he’s lying. Rule number one: Never believe a word that comes out of a cop’s mouth.

I told him all that before he could start with his questions. Hadley just sat there while I protested. You’re wrong. I was never there. No way you found my fingerprints. And then something occurred to me.

“How’d you get my fingerprints anyway?” I asked.

Hadley shrugged, as if it were so easy it was hardly worth telling me how he did it. “Remember that woman in the park who asked you for directions? She was one of mine.”

“Her map was sticky,” I remembered.

“So we had a very nice fingerprint sample,” Hadley said, a tiny smug smile under his mustache.

“Okay,” I told him. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I was never in Lowell’s apartment.”

Hadley sighed loudly. The kind of sigh that says you’re a liar and you know it and I know it, so why keep playing games? Except I wasn’t lying.

“There were two glasses of wine on the coffee table,” Hadley told me. “One had Lowell’s prints on it. The other had yours.”

“No way.”

“I can show you the lab report if you’d like.”

I thought about saying yes, but I don’t read enough Jeffery Deaver novels to understand all this stuff. I tried to make sense of this. Either he was lying, or I was being set up.

“Look, Inspector, I was never there, but I’ve drunk a lot of wine in my life, so maybe someone put it there. And, besides, would I be stupid enough to leave my fingerprints sitting there for you to find?”

“You’d be surprised how stupid people can be.”

Well, that’s true.

“So, what, I panicked while giving him a midair blow job?” I asked. “Is that what you think? He kicked the bucket, and I ran?”

“Is that what happened?”

“No.”

“Are you saying it was an accident?”

“I’m saying I wasn’t there.”

“It’s funny you should mention oral sex,” Hadley said. “Exactly how did you know that Mr. Bardwright had been receiving oral sex prior to his death?”

Shit!

“It was a figure of speech,” I said.

“Like the corset and high heels joke? That was just a figure of speech, too?”

I felt my face getting hot. “Yes.”

“Interesting,” Hadley said. Then he added, “Tell me about your dealings with the Santelli Agency in Milan.”

“Excuse me?”

“I believe there were allegations that you were rigging deals for Italian publishing rights and getting kickbacks,” Hadley said. “This was about two months ago.”

“Yes, and it was bullshit,” I snapped. “Complete crap.”

And it was. An Italian publisher in Rome raised a stink when he lost three deals in a row to a competitor, and Leonardo Santelli and I got caught in a nasty war of accusations and threats between the two archrivals. Sally had warned me about these guys, but I hadn’t listened. You shouldn’t get caught between two pit bulls in a fight, and you never want to land in the middle of an Italian blood feud. These guys fight dirty. Filing pointless lawsuits. Buying off each other’s corrupt politicians. Sleeping with each other’s mistresses.

I told Hadley all about it.

“How was it resolved?” he asked.

“I finally said a pox on both your houses. I don’t deal with either of them anymore.”

“Did Mr. Bardwright know about the allegation of kickbacks?”

“Yes.”

“Did he speak to you about it?”

“Yes, of course. I told him what I told you. There was no truth to it. It was complete fabrication.”

“So the matter was closed?”

“Yes.”

Hadley nodded. “Why would Mr. Bardwright have an e-mail about this issue open on the laptop computer in his home office?”

“What?”

“He had an e-mail about you and the alleged Italian kickbacks on his machine. It was on the screen when we booted it up.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. We put that issue to bed weeks ago.”

“If the allegation of kickbacks were true, what would that mean for your reputation in the industry? It would be devastating, wouldn’t it?”

“The allegations weren’t true,” I told him.

“If they were true, or if people thought they were true, that would give Mr. Bardwright rather a lot of leverage over you, I should think.”

“They weren’t true,” I repeated.

“Would you sleep with your boss to keep something like that quiet? Is that worthy of blackmail?”

“Fuck you,” I snapped.

This was probably the point where he expected me to break down and sob and confess. Except I had nothing to confess. Well, not about Lowell, anyway. My list of sins would keep a priest busy for hours, but murder, kickbacks, and erotic asphyxia are not among them.

Hadley smoothed his thinning gray hair. He sipped his god-awful coffee and slowly turned pages in a file folder on his desk. He had an aura of serene calm. I hate people who are calm. If you don’t wear your heart on your sleeve, I’m not sure you’re really alive.

“Remember that dress you said you lost at the cleaners?” Hadley asked. “The one you wore to the Christmas party where Lowell had his arm around your waist in that photograph in the
Bookseller
?”

“Yes,” I repeated. “What about it?”

“We found it in Lowell’s closet.”

“Get the fuck out of here!” I said in a voice that was way too loud. I’m not averse to the
F
word, but you can tell I’m riled if I use it twice in less than a minute.

Once again, Hadley ignored my outburst. “This, again, is interesting, because you say you’ve never been in his apartment.”

“I haven’t.”

“So your dress and your fingerprints went there without you?” Hadley asked.

“You did not find that dress. You are lying to me, Inspector, and I’m tired of it. Quit trying to play head games with me.”

He passed me a photo of the dress without saying a word. It was definitely mine. I thought about asking to get it back, because I missed that dress, and I was really pissed that the cleaners had lost it. But I figured I would be pushing my luck.

“Okay, someone is setting me up,” I said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

Really. That was when it hit me. This wasn’t a game. This was dead serious, and Lowell was the one who was dead. Someone had killed him, and whoever did it wanted me to take the fall. Someone had given me a motive and put in a lot of effort to make it appear that I was inside Lowell’s apartment. I realized that Hadley was right. Lowell ran an agency that made deals worth millions of pounds. For some people, that was worth killing over.

I could think of only one person who would stand to gain from this kind of conspiracy. Cosima.

Cosima, who had bought her way into Lowell’s agency and was tired of waiting for him to step down. Cosima, who had plans of world domination that didn’t mesh with Lowell’s laissez-faire attitude of keeping the agency just the way it had been for forty years.

Cosima, who said she would bury me if I dared to leave Bardwright and go out on my own.