The Day Trader (30 page)

Mary doesn’t answer. She just stares at me, shaking.

“Miss?”

I step past her and head straight for the door, hoping she won’t come after me. Or tell the workmen that I went through her desk and have them try to stop me.

Thankfully, she doesn’t do either. But as I open one of the glass doors leading out of the Bedford lobby, I almost run smack into Roger coming in. We stare at each other silently for several moments.

“What was all of that about yesterday at the bar?” he finally asks. “Why the Perry Mason routine?”

“I wanted to know why you lied about going to Maryland and working at the DOE,” I answer evenly, glancing back over my shoulder at the swinging doors leading to the trading floor, expecting to see Mary emerge. I ought to blow past him, but I can’t resist asking one more time.

“Listen to me, Augustus. I don’t like people digging into my past. Not that I have anything to hide,” he adds quickly. “I’m warning you,” he says, pointing a bony finger at me, “stay away from me from now on. There’ll be trouble if you don’t.”

We both know he can’t threaten me. He probably couldn’t punch a hole through a wet paper towel. “You didn’t work at the DOE, did you?”

“What difference does it make?” he asks.

“Maybe none, but I want to know.”

“Ten years. Doing budgets, like I told you.”

“No way. I called over there. They have no record of a Roger Smith ever having worked there.”

“Oh, yes, and we all know how good the federal government is at keeping records.”

“There was no John Embry either.”

His face goes pale. “Huh?”

“Are you really married?”

Roger shakes his head, trying to regain his composure. “You can’t quit, can you, Augustus? You can’t accept the fact that I’m an average guy, and that this day trading gig is just me trying to save myself from a grind of a life before I end up doing what Slammer did.”

“Then why all the lies?”

“You’re—”

One of the swinging doors opens suddenly and Mary appears. She stops short, her eyes flickering from Roger to me. “Better check your desk, Roger,” she says fiercely. “Augustus doesn’t seem to have much respect for personal privacy.”

Sticking around right now isn’t going to do me any good. Neither one of them is going to answer my questions, and I’ll just end up taking a verbal ass-beating. So I push past Roger, and instead of waiting for an elevator, I take the stairs. Nine stories down, and with each step all I can think about is how far it is and how desperate Slammer must have been to jump. How there must have been so much more going on in his life than I knew about. And then there’s Mary . . .

It doesn’t make sense to me that a woman who seems to have so little, and, by her own admission, grew up poor, would waste money on a psychic. Before I can reconsider, I decide I’m going to the source to find out what’s really going on. I make the fifteen-minute drive to the small side street where Mary took me the other morning.

“Hello, Sasha,” I say calmly, standing in the open doorway beneath the tarot sign.

Her eyes widen as she looks up from her desk. She hadn’t heard me coming down the steps to her substreet lair. I close the door behind me, and now the room turns quiet and the street noise fades.

“What do you want?”

“I want to know about your relationship with Mary Segal.”

“I’m her psychic,” Sasha answers, standing up. “That’s all.”

“Don’t screw with me!” I shout, slamming my hand on the round table in the middle of the room where we all sat a few days ago. “I’m tired of these damn lies.”

“Get out of here,” she orders, her voice cracking. “Or I’ll call the cops.”

When I don’t react she reaches for the phone on her desk, but I step across the room and rip the cord from the wall before she can finish dialing. “Tell me what’s going on!”

“Get away from me,” she hisses, backing up until her body meets the wall.

I take several steps around her desk and now we’re only a few feet apart. “Talk to me.”

“Get away,” she pleads again, turning toward the wall and shutting her eyes. “Please don’t hurt me.”

“Why would I hurt you? What have you done that would make me want to do that?”

“Nothing, I swear.”

“Why did you call Mary on her cell phone a few minutes after we left here the other day? She said it was an old friend from Kentucky, but we both know the truth, don’t we?”

Sasha’s eyes open and she slowly turns her head back to look at me.

It was a gamble, but I’ve definitely hit a nerve. “I got a quick look at the inbound number on the screen of Mary’s cell phone,” I continue. “I didn’t catch it all, but I saw the 703 area code. I have no idea what Kentucky’s is, but it isn’t 703 because that’s right here in northern Virginia.” I take another step toward her. We’re only inches apart. Her back is flat against the wall, and I can see she’s terrified. “How long have you been offering your services as a psychic?”

“Ten years.”

“But you’re not in the Yellow Pages. I checked. All good psychics advertise in the Yellow Pages because they, better than anyone, know that copper and glass phone lines are the only real transmitters.”

“I . . . I put the ad in there last month,” she stammers. “The new book hasn’t come out yet.”

“Why did you wait ten years to advertise?”

“I came to this area only recently.”

“Where did you come from?”

“Florida.”

“Problems with the law down there?”

“No, nothing like that.”

She swallows hard as I reach up and wrap my fingers around her thin neck. This is crazy, I think. This isn’t me.

“What are you going to do?” she gasps.

“You’re the psychic,” I say, gently squeezing the soft skin of her throat. There’s no escape, and she knows it. I’m so much stronger than she is. “You tell me.”

“I have an appointment coming,” she whimpers. “He’ll be here any minute.”

“I doubt that. It’s Saturday, it’s summer, and it’s a beautiful day. Most men are playing golf or cutting their lawns right now, not visiting psychics. If you had said
she
was going to be here any minute, I might have believed you.” I play her game—the game of probability. There’s no appointment coming. I move my hand up her throat until my thumb and forefinger rest tightly beneath her ears, then I squeeze even harder and push her chin toward the ceiling. A strange excitement overtakes me.

“Mary told me she had been coming to you once a week since her husband died. That was last Christmas. Seven months ago. But when I drove her over here a couple of days ago she was paying very close attention to where we were. She was checking landmarks off as if she wasn’t sure where she was going. A woman who had been coming to see you for seven months wouldn’t do that.”

Sasha’s eyes flash from side to side. She puts one hand on my wrist, but doesn’t attempt to pull my fingers from her throat as she struggles to breathe.

“When did you move here from Florida?”

I ease the pressure on her throat so she can reply. “Two months ago.”

“Mary hasn’t been seeing you since Christmas like she told me she has.”

“No, she hasn’t,” Sasha admits. “Please stop,” she begs.

“Keep answering the questions and everything will be fine.” Should I be enjoying this? Shouldn’t this just be about getting the facts? “When did Mary come to see you for the first time?”

She coughs and winces.

“Tell me!”

“About two weeks ago.”

“
Exactly
when.”

“I’d have to look at my date book,” she says, gripping my wrist with both hands now. “I don’t know exactly.”

“Think!”

“It was a week ago this past Wednesday,” she says. “I remember now. I exercised at a gym around the corner for the first time that morning, and Mary came in after that. She was my first appointment after my workout.”

A week ago Wednesday. My third full day at Bedford. “What did she want?”

Now Sasha is trying to pry my fingers off her neck, but she can’t. “She said she was going to bring you over to see me on her next visit, and she wanted me to say that I envisioned you and her together. That was all we talked about during her entire visit.”

“Why did she want you to see us that way?”

“She thought it would help make you feel about her the way she feels about you. She’s very attracted to you, Augustus. Is that so terrible?”

“You called Mary on her cell phone after we left to give your vision credibility,” I say, squeezing a little more tightly. “If your prediction about the call from Kentucky came true, then I’d be more inclined to believe your vision about us, right?”

“Mary’s just a lonely soul, like so many others. She told me it was love at first sight when she saw you.”

I’m about to tell Sasha that there is no such thing as love at first sight when I think back on how I felt in that high school hallway the first time I saw Melanie. I don’t know if it was love, but it was a powerful emotion. “She told you about my wife too, didn’t she? That was the terrible loss. She primed you, right?”

“Yes, yes!” Sasha whines. “You’re hurting me. I’ve told you everything I know. I swear! God, I can’t breathe!”

I grit my teeth and squeeze Sasha’s throat even harder, gazing into her terrified eyes. I’m enjoying this. I can’t believe it.

Suddenly the door creaks on its hinges and I whip around, releasing my grip on Sasha’s neck. Standing in the doorway is a young man who reminds me of Daniel. He has wild, multicolored hair and a ring in his nose. The probabilities have failed me.

“Get out of here!” I roar.

He stumbles backward, then turns and scrambles up the stairs. I take one quick look back at Sasha, who has dropped to her knees and is gasping for air, then race for the stairs myself.

Inside of five minutes I’m back in the BMW, heading for home around the Beltway. I try to call Reggie at his office, but he doesn’tpick up so I try him on his cell phone. He scrawled that number on a scrap piece of paper at the morgue and told me to use if I ever really needed him.

“Detective Dorsey.”

“Reggie, it’s Augustus.”

There’s a slight pause. “Hello.”

I hesitate, wondering if it was a mistake to have called. “What’s going on with the investigation? I hadn’t heard from you in a few days, and I’m getting worried that you’re losing steam.” I want to put him on the defensive. I want to establish who’s in charge of this call.

“Not at all. I’m working on several promising leads.”

“What are they?”

“I’d rather not go into them right now,” he says, “especially on an unsecured line like this. Why did you call me on my cell number? Something wrong?”

“No,” I answer defensively.

“Is there anything else? I’m very busy.”

“I have a favor to ask.”

“What?”

“I need you to check someone out for me.”

“Why?”

“I think a woman I know has figured out that I’m going to be coming into some money.”

“So?”

“She’s been following me. Stalking me.”

“Stalking you?”

“Yeah, she’s showed up a couple of times out of the blue,” I say, trying to say something that will spark Reggie’s interest.

“What do you mean?”

“I stopped by the office today and all of a sudden she showed up. She works at Bedford too, but it’s Saturday. Why would she show up right after me on the weekend?”

“That’s not exactly—”

“I think I saw her in the parking lot of a store near my house a couple of nights ago too, and I could have sworn I saw her car go by my house this morning. But she doesn’t live anywhere near me.” I’ve got to get him to investigate her. Suddenly I’ve got a bad feeling about Mary.

“I can’t check anyone out based on that. Do you know—”

“She claims she was married to a real estate wheeler-dealer here in northern Virginia,” I continue. “A man named Jacob who she says left her two million dollars, a Jaguar, and a big house in McLean. She never told me his last name.” There’s no response from the other end of the line, and I’m worried I’ve lost the connection. “Reggie?”

“I’m here,” he says.

“She says the guy died last Christmas. He was older. In his sixties or seventies. He had kids who weren’t happy about him leaving her the money.”

“What’s her name?”

“Mary Segal.”

No response.

“Does any of that sound familiar, Reggie? A northern Virginia real estate mogul dying last Christmas Eve?”

“No,” he says indifferently. “Augustus, you let me do the investigating.”

“Check her out, Reggie. Again, her name’s Mary Segal. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you, Augustus, but now you listen to me. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay away from Vincent Carlucci.”

I hesitate. “Why?”

“He’s organized crime.”

For a moment all sounds fade to nothing. This is Vincent he’s talking about. Someone I’ve known for more than twenty years. Reggie’s crazy. “Organized crime? That can’t be.”

“Believe me. He’s with the mob. He hangs with some very nasty characters.”

“How do you know?”

“Scott Snyder told me. He’s ex-FBI and he’s known about Vincent for some time.” Reggie pauses. “I believe you and Scott met this morning after you bought the cell phone you’re talking on right now. And the BMW you’re driving.”

I have to jerk the steering wheel to the left to avoid a slower car, and I glance down at the speedometer. I’m doing eighty. “You’re wrong about Vincent,” I say firmly, easing my foot off the accelerator.

“No, I’m not. Snyder called his buddies over at the Bureau, Augustus. Carlucci’s been under surveillance for the last few months. I’m not at liberty to tell you why, but if you’re smart, you’ll stay away from him.”

The money. The ten million dollars. I still haven’t met his investors.

“Call me tomorrow, Augustus,” Reggie says. “I want you to stay in very close communication with me from now on.”

“Why?” I ask shakily.

“I just do.”

Then he’s gone, the connection cut.

Twenty minutes later I ease to a stop in front of my house, walk up the path, and open the front door. For several moments I stand in the foyer in disbelief. The living room is a disaster area. Furniture is ripped apart and turned upside down, cabinets are turned over, and dishes and glasses lie shattered on the floor.