The Garden of Betrayal (27 page)

“Run it down for me again,” Reggie said.

I was at the chart on the wall, walking him through the connections while Claire and Kate listened. My weariness had vanished.

“Theresa was the one who passed me the Saudi information,” I said, touching one of the boxes Kate had drawn earlier. “She was introduced to me by Alex. Walter and I suspect the Saudi information actually came from the U.S. government, by way of Senator Simpson. Narimanov confirmed the government link and said that Alex had been trying to back-check the information through Washington.”

Reggie rocked backward in his chair, fingers laced behind his head.

“I like the fact that this Roxas woman is a direct link between Munoz and what’s happening now.” He gestured to the chart. “It tells me you’re on the right track with all of this. But I still got a big problem understanding the logistics of what happened to Kyle.”

“The logistics or the motive?” Claire asked.

“Both, but let’s stick with the logistics. I’m going to start by assuming that Munoz was a good guy. Anyone have a problem with that?”

I glanced at Claire and Kate, and then shrugged.

“Fine. Then I’m further going to assume that it wasn’t Munoz who moved the car. You lure a guy into a motel room to whack him, you don’t let him run out for cigarettes. All the parking-lot camera saw was a big guy in a camel-hair coat. Could have been anyone.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So, these people have got this carefully choreographed operation going on to discredit and murder Munoz, and in the middle of it, they
take time out to have one of their people dress up like Munoz and drive his car all the way up to your neighborhood. And their objective is to kidnap a child who they couldn’t possibly have expected to find on the street at that time of night.”

“Maybe they were looking for my dad,” Kate offered in a small voice.

“I don’t buy it,” Reggie said. “Your schedule’s never been predictable, has it, Mark?”

“Not really.”

“And if they were there for you, what would have put them on to Kyle? They couldn’t have been expected to know what your family looked like. On top of which, why bother mixing you up with Munoz at all? If they wanted to hit you, too, why not do it another day? Why make things so complicated?”

The answer hit me like a bullet. It was the mention of family that did it.

“What?” Kate demanded apprehensively, her eyes fixed on me.

“They weren’t there for Kyle, or for me. They were there for Claire.” I sagged against the wall, my knees weak. “They’d researched my family. They knew Claire left the apartment at the same time every night to go to work. But she didn’t go that evening, because I’d flown to London on short notice.”

The shock I felt was reflected on Claire and Kate’s faces.

“Reggie?” Claire breathed.

“Makes sense,” he answered softly. “They’d painted Munoz as a violent woman abuser and put him together with the car on the security video in the right time window.”

I shook my head at him, loath to have him speculate on the details, but Claire caught the gesture out of the corner of her eye.

“Enough,” she said angrily. “Stop trying to protect us from the truth. I want to know exactly what Reggie thinks was supposed to have happened that night.”

“You sure?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He reached for a cigarette and then caught himself.

“My best guess is that Roxas—the girlfriend—lured Munoz to the motel and kept him busy in bed while a guy wearing a similar coat took the car. He and an accomplice or two drove uptown to grab Claire. Could have gone a couple of different ways from there, but, bottom line,
Claire and Munoz were supposed to have been found dead together the next morning—in the motel, or in the car, or somewhere else. Cops looking into it would have figured things went south somehow with the hooker, so Carlos went out looking for entertainment. He grabbed Claire off the street, and then things got away from him. Murder-suicide. Maybe they even planned to have Roxas put a call in to 911 as the hooker, saying some john she picked up went crazy and tried to beat the crap out of her, and that she had to flee down the fire stairs. It wouldn’t have taken a lot to sell the story, given the security video and his supposed history.”

I felt sick to my stomach.

“Gallegos told me that Carlos’s enemies wanted to discredit him, to embarrass his political allies. The Venezuelan press hammered him for having been with a hooker when he died. Imagine what they would have done with this story.”

“Suppose you’re right,” Claire said. She was ashen and breathing heavily, but she looked stronger than I felt. “Why Kyle?”

“Maybe they improvised—which confirms they had a motive beyond just discrediting Munoz.” He glanced at me pityingly. “Only one common result of hurting a man’s wife or child. To incapacitate the man.”

“It had to have been something I was working on,” I whispered. “Something they wanted me to leave alone.”

“And they didn’t want to come right out and kill you,” Reggie added, “because the police would have dug into possible motives. This way they discredited Munoz, knocked you for a loop, and maybe even sent a message to some third parties about what happens to people who don’t play ball. It all fits.”

“And if I hadn’t flown off to London unexpectedly, it all would have worked.”

Our stunned silence was broken by Reggie’s cell phone. He checked the number and answered it, stepping into one of the bedrooms to talk.

“Gallegos,” Claire said urgently. “You need to get to him, Mark. You need to find out who told him to keep his mouth shut.”

“He won’t tell me.”

“So, make him.”

I didn’t have to ask what she meant. Kate was biting her lip, looking troubled.

“No. Gallegos is innocent. Even if I could make him talk, he’d likely only give us another Venezuelan. And we don’t want that guy. We want the guy behind him, the person who was pulling the strings.”

“We start with whoever Gallegos gives us and work our way up the line,” Claire insisted.

“How? These people are diplomats, Claire. Whoever leaned on Gallegos probably isn’t even in America.” I shook my head. “There’s a better way.”

“The bribe,” Kate said. “The one that Carlos turned down.”

“Right. The bribe was shares in an undervalued oil company. I make it even money that I tumbled onto the scam somehow and started asking questions. We need to go through my old files and see what pops out. If we can figure out which oil company it was, I might be able to follow the money back to the source.”

Claire nodded hesitantly and then glanced at our chart on the wall.

“You suspect that Simpson used Theresa Roxas to get the Saudi data to you. Does that make him the source?”

I rubbed my neck, trying to imagine why Simpson would have been bribing Venezuelan diplomats.

“No idea.”

“And what about Alex?”

“What about him?”

“He lied to you about knowing Theresa Roxas,” she said, her face hard. “Does that tell us anything?”

“Only that someone leaned on him as well,” I answered, feeling pained. “But I have to believe he would have come clean with me if he’d been able to establish that the Saudi information was false. He was a friend.”

“Is that why Rashid was killed?” Kate asked. “To prevent him from telling you the truth?”

“Maybe,” I said, beginning to feel overwhelmed again. The more we learned, the more complicated things got. “Or to prevent him from telling me something about Carlos Munoz’s murder, or Kyle’s kidnapping, or something else we haven’t figured out yet.”

“We need to think more about this Saudi connection,” Kate insisted. “We need to figure out …”

Reggie walked back into the room and cleared his throat, his expression grim.

“I have some news,” he said. “It’s not good.”

Claire and Kate rose simultaneously and came to me. I put an arm around each and pulled them tight.

“The call I just took was from the guy leading the search team in Staten Island. He got lucky and bumped into a couple of old-timers who like to fish out that way. They knew exactly where Vinny’s boss had been dumping cars. Search team pulled the BMW out of the water about an hour and a half ago.”

“And?” Claire asked breathlessly.

“And there were human remains in the trunk.”

Kate buried her face in my shoulder, and I felt Claire trembling.

“Were they able to make an identification?”

“Take a day or two for dental,” Reggie answered. “But the remains were wrapped in a Gore-Tex coat, and the coat held up well. Technicians rinsed it off and found a name written in the lining. Your name, Mark. I’m sorry.”

We buried Kyle on Monday morning, at a cemetery half an hour north of the city. The grave we’d picked out sat on a flat shelf at the top of a long rise, with views of the Long Island Sound over the bare branches of a grove of maples below. A local minister conducted an open-air service beneath a cloudless sky, an ocean breeze carrying the smell of salt. It seemed like a good place to lay our child to rest.

Afterward, everyone wanted to shake our hands and express their condolences. I was surprised by how many people came. The
Times
had run a small story on Sunday that included the details, and we’d invited some family and friends, but I hadn’t expected much of a crowd. In the end, though, more than a hundred people turned out—neighbors, colleagues, even one of the Columbia kids who’d helped me post flyers all those years ago. And there was at least a dozen wreaths. I was relieved to see that one was from Mariano Gallegos. Given everything that had happened, I’d been worried about him.

“Who’s that?” Kate whispered, when there were only a handful of people left.

Claire and I both glanced in the direction she was looking. A broad-shouldered guy with a pot belly was hovering about ten yards away, a kid a few years older than Kate shuffling his feet next to him.

“Kyle’s old baseball coach,” I said, placing the man’s face. “Jon something. He owned a shoe store on Broadway.” I made eye contact and waved him over. “The younger guy must be his son.”

Father and son came to an awkward halt at the edge of conversational range.

“Jon Rosenthal,” the older man stammered. “This is my boy, Steve. You might not remember us. Steve and Kyle played ball together.”

“In the West Side League,” Claire responded gently. “You coached. Of course we remember.”

“I wasn’t sure it was right for us to come. It’s been a long time.”

“We’re grateful,” Claire assured him. “It means a lot to us.”

“I just wanted to let you know how terrible I felt for you all these years. It was something I could never stop thinking about. I’m so unbelievably sorry about what happened, but I’m glad you finally found him. Kyle was a really good kid. Everybody on the team always really liked him.…”

He broke down mid-sentence and began sobbing. His son threw an arm around him and hugged him fiercely. It was an experience I’d had before, bumping into Kyle’s old friends and their parents in our neighborhood. The encounters had all been charged with bitterness for me. No matter how sincere the grief expressed, I knew the innermost emotion of any parent in my presence had to be joy that their own child was well and with them. Today was different somehow. I looked at Steve. He’d grown tall, with his father’s shoulders and an athletic build.

“You still play ball?” I asked quietly.

“At Maryland,” he mumbled, his gaze fixed on the ground between us.

“That’s Division One, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

I took a step toward him and reached out to touch his arm.

“Thanks for being here today. And good luck to you—to both of you. You take care of your father now, okay?”

He looked up and nodded. I watched as they walked away together, glad they’d come. They disappeared behind a stand of pines shielding the parking area, and my eyes drifted south, toward the sound. A flock of wild turkeys was grazing along the tree line below, and the sun was glinting off the distant water. There was only one thing left that I had to do for my son—one thing that Claire and Kate and I were determined to do together.

“You ready?” I asked.

They both nodded. We turned as one and headed toward the parking lot.

“October eleventh,” Claire said, reading from one of my old appointment books. “You had breakfast with a guy named Jens Solheim.”

I hunted through the S boxes stacked on one of the trestle tables lining the perimeter of the large workroom, looking for Solheim’s file. We’d stopped by the hotel after the funeral to change clothes and then continued on to the Queens warehouse where Amy stored my old records. The top floor of the former factory was partitioned into lofts that were usually rented out to law firms dredging through discovery material. High-speed wireless Internet, a Nespresso machine, a Bloomberg terminal, and an Xbox 360 hooked up to a fifty-inch plasma display were all part of the standard package. Being there reminded me of the long hours I’d spent proofreading prospectuses at the printers when I was a young investment banking associate. Like the warehouse, the printers kept hotel-quality facilities on the premises as a competitive lure. Video games got old fast in the small hours, and the tedium had made me agitate for a switch to research. I found the file I was looking for and flipped it open.

“Solheim was CEO of a Norwegian company named Axion. He wanted my European guys to initiate coverage. Said Axion was planning to acquire a bunch of refinery assets with financing from a syndicate of Scandi banks. I forwarded a summary of the conversation and his request to our downstream guy in London. No follow-up indicated.”

“Axion,” Kate said, tapping away at her laptop’s keyboard as Claire watched over her shoulder. They were both seated at a round conference table in the middle of the room. “Was trading at twenty-five on the
Oslo exchange when you had breakfast with Solheim. Got as high as thirty-six the following year, and then faded back down to the low twenties.”

“Market cap?”