Due Diligence: A Thriller (45 page)

“This is Caitlin Jones, Sergeant. I work with Emmy.”

“Well, Caitlin, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but there was a certain crime—”

“Yes,” said Caitlin quickly. “I’m aware. I’m very aware.”

“Well…” The man coughed again. “Excuse me. We need to find Ms. Bridges, but we’ve had some information get kind of lost or something and I’m trying to follow up.”

“She’s not here, Sergeant.”

“No, I understand. Do you have her address, please?”

“Umm…” Caitlin looked questioningly at Andrea.

“What?” whispered Andrea.

“We’re not supposed to give that kind of information out,” Caitlin said to the man on the phone.

“I realize that. This is urgent, Ms. Jones. Let me make sure I’ve got your name right. That’s Caitlin Jones. Can you spell ‘Caitlin’ for me?”

Caitlin spelled it.

“I hope you’re going to cooperate, Ms. Jones.”

“Can you hold on a second?” Caitlin put her palm over the receiver. “It’s a policeman,” she whispered to Andrea. “He needs Emmy’s address. Should I give it to him?”

“Give it to him.”

“You sure?”

Andrea nodded.

“Sergeant…”

“Berry.”

“Sergeant Berry, I’m not supposed to do this, but you did say it’s urgent?”

“It is.”

“Okay. I know she lives on West Seventy-sixth Street. I think it’s one forty-four.”

“I think it’s one forty-two,” whispered Andrea.

“It might be one forty-two. I know it’s apartment seven.”

“Ms. Jones, I need it exactly. It’s very important.”

“Okay. Hold on a second, please.” Caitlin opened the internal company database on her screen and searched through it quickly. The man on the line coughed as he waited. “It’s one forty-two,” she said.

Andrea smiled smugly.

“So that’s apartment seven, one forty-two West Seventy-sixth? Is that correct, Ms. Jones?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“Sergeant Berry, if I see her, do you want me to tell Emmy—” She took the phone away from her ear and looked at Andrea in surprise. “Rude! He just hung up.”

“Well, he got what he wanted, I guess.” Andrea shrugged. “Like any man.”

*   *   *

One hundred forty-two West Seventy-sixth Street was an old brownstone. The two men let themselves in easily, looked around, and moved quickly up the stairs. They stopped outside apartment 7 and slipped on surgical gloves. Then they knocked.

One of the men had the inflamed nose and watery eyes of a cold. He coughed. “Go ahead,” he said quietly to the other.

The second man quickly picked the lock. They went in, closing the door behind them.

They stood for a moment, looking around. Then the man with the cold pointed at the corridor that led to the bedroom. The second man moved silently toward it.

He came back a minute later. “No one,” he said. “No one in the bathroom, neither.”

“You check the cupboards? Under the bed?”

The man nodded.

“Okay.” The man with the cold looked around the room. He picked up a letter. It was addressed to Emmy Bridges. “It’s the right place.”

“You want I should call Nick?”

“I’ll call him.” He dialed a number on a cell phone. There was a short conversation. He looked back at the other man. “We wait.”

“How long?”

“As long as it takes.” The man with the cold walked over to the kitchen area. He pulled open the fridge. “Let’s see what we got in here,” he muttered. “You want a beer?”

“Why not?” The other man came over and pulled open a couple of cupboards.

“What’s she got in there?”

“Not much. We might have to send out for pizza.”

“Yeah, right.” The man with the cold closed the fridge and put a beer in the other man’s hand. He looked in the cupboards. “Well, she likes corn chips. There’s enough here for weeks.”

“I hate corn chips.”

The man with the cold took out a bag and pushed it into his hand. “Learn to love ’em.”

“So who gets the bed?”

The man with the cold looked at him questioningly.

“If we’re here overnight, who gets the bed?”

The man with the cold grinned. “What, Danny, you gone all shy? You telling me you don’t wanna share?”

“Get the hell—”

The phone rang. The two men turned to look at it.

The answering machine kicked in. “Emmy? Emmy, it’s Mom. I tried your cell phone but I thought you might … I’ll try your cell phone again, honey. Okay. If you get this, call me, huh? I just want to see if you’re all right. Umm … okay, I’ll try your cell.”

The men glanced at each other.

“Sounds like she’s not answering her cell.”

The man with the cold nodded. “Well, we’ll be here if she comes home.”

In Rochester, Emmy’s mother put the phone down. She looked at her husband in concern. “That’s the third time today I’ve tried to get hold of her, Marty.”

“Did you leave a message on her cell?”

“Every time. That’s not like Emmy. She always answers when I leave a message.”

“She’s probably trying to get some peace.”

“Are you saying I don’t give her peace?”

“I’m not saying that, Rose.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“It’s a tough thing, what happened. That’s all.”

Emmy’s mother frowned with worry. “She sounded very upset last night, Marty. I couldn’t sleep, thinking about it.”

Marty nodded.

“I offered to go down.”

“I know.”

“And you know, things haven’t been good with Rob.”

“Haven’t they?”

“You know they haven’t. I told you, remember? I’m just worried she’s lying there with the phone turned off, all by herself, just, you know, really upset.”

“Honey, that’s not like Emmy.”

“Maybe they’ve broken up.”

“Did she say they’d—”

“They could have. These things happen at stressful moments. Marty, you didn’t speak to her last night. She was really upset. And Rob wasn’t there. She didn’t know where he was!”

Marty frowned. He didn’t know what to say.

“Maybe I should go, Marty.”

“She told you she’d let you know if she wanted you to go down.”

“Maybe I should go anyway.”

47

The night was cold and drizzly, but that was about the only similarity to the last time Rob had flown into London, only a little over a week previously. This time, he arrived economy class and there was no car waiting. And instead of Cynthia Holloway, he was with Emmy.

They had been at JFK before six that morning, but couldn’t get on a flight until nine-thirty. They went through passport control and spent three nervous hours sitting at the back of a restaurant, hiding themselves behind newspapers. Rob wasn’t taking any chances. Just because they were in an airport didn’t mean they were safe. They weren’t going to be safe until all of this was over.

He came across a report of Greg’s death in the
Times
. A couple of short paragraphs on an inside page.
DA MURDERED IN HELL
’
S KITCHEN
. No real details. A police spokesman quoted as saying the investigation was being pursued with all available resources. Those were the two detectives, Rob supposed, Engels and Nabandian. He showed the article to Emmy. She read it silently.

He fell asleep after the flight took off, having slept so little the night before. When he woke up a couple of hours later, Emmy was dozing beside him. He watched her. He thought about what she had said that morning. She hadn’t been trying to guilt-trip him, he realized, when she said it was all or nothing, when she said there was nothing involving him that didn’t involve her. She was simply saying how it was. That was how it was for her. It was a scary thing, to hear someone say that about you. Not just to hear it, but to actually see it in action. To see her get out of bed and say, unquestioningly, I’m coming with you, before she even knew where he was going. To say, Fuck them, if they get one of us, they get us both. It was awesome, and scary. Overpowering. He felt he had never really understood it before. He felt like a kid, as if he never really knew what love was until that moment. Not just the feeling you have for someone else—but the ability to let someone else have that same depth of feeling for you. To surrender to it, to give them that right, as Emmy had said. And she deserved an answer. Was that what he was prepared to do? Did his love go that far? Because hers did.

She woke up and looked at him. “What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing,” he said.

She was silent. She looked at her watch.

“We’ve got about three hours to go,” said Rob.

“Where will we go when we get there?”

“I want to stay away from the obvious places. You remember where we went when we were here?”

Emmy nodded.

“We’ll stay there overnight. By the time we arrive it’ll be too late for me to make the call. I won’t be able to do it until morning.”

They left Heathrow on the express that runs downtown to Paddington Station. When they got off the train, they walked through the station and headed into the darkness and rain of the streets outside. There were hotels nearby, crummy hotels, not the kind an investment banker would go to.

They turned a corner. There they were, hotels, a whole streetful.

They were all the same, converted terrace houses with signs above the doors glowing through the drizzle and mist. One after the other.
GREEN HOTEL
.
BARTLETT HOTEL
.
FRANKEL HOUSE HOTEL
.
CORBETT HOTEL
.

That was the one where they had stayed the previous summer. The Corbett.

Rob headed for it, then thought better of that idea and they went to one a couple of doors away. They went up the steps. By now it was almost midnight. The door was locked. Looking through the glass, Rob could see the little reception desk at the opposite end of the hall. It was unattended. He rang the bell. Then he rang it again.

After about a minute, the night clerk appeared from a door behind the reception desk. Rob watched him coming toward the entrance. He was a thin guy, with protruding cheekbones and hollow cheeks. The blue tie he was wearing was about six inches wide and rode a good two inches above his waistband. He opened the door.

“You got a room?” asked Rob.

The clerk gave them a strange look. They had no luggage with them, nothing.

“Two person?” he said in some kind of an Eastern European accent.

Rob nodded.

“Eighty pounds.”

“Okay.”

“With breakfast.”

“Fine.”

The man stepped back and let them in. He led them down the hall and went behind the desk.

“How long you want room?” asked the clerk.

Rob shrugged. “Couple of days.”

“You pay now.”

“Yeah?”

“You pay one day. You want more … tomorrow…”

“I pay then?” said Rob.

The man grinned. He looked at Emmy and she smiled back at him.

Rob had withdrawn a few hundred in sterling on his credit card before leaving Heathrow. He pulled out some bills.

The man took them. He pushed a piece of paper toward Rob. “You fill in.”

The man turned around to take a key out of a set of pigeonholes on the wall. Rob hesitated over the form. Bill Smith, he wrote, in the box for his name. Then he thought, That was pretty dumb.

“Where you from?” asked the clerk as Rob was filling out the form.

“The States,” said Emmy.

“Ah!” The clerk grinned again. “The States! I will go to States. Yes. Soon, when I finish my study here…”

Rob slid the form toward him.

The clerk looked at it. “Bill Smith?”

“That’s right,” said Rob. He took the key. “You gonna give me a receipt?”

The clerk looked at him blankly.

“A receipt?”

“What?”

Rob sighed. “For the money. For the eighty pounds. So your boss knows I paid.”

The clerk smiled and waved a hand dismissively. “She knows.”

“How does she know?”

“When person come, I must take money!” The clerk held his finger up emphatically, as if this was an iron rule that could never conceivably be broken.

Rob looked at him for a second. He just about opened his mouth to reply, but then he imagined the argument they were about to have. It was too difficult. He just wanted to get up to the room. “What floor?”

“Top,” said the clerk. “Stairs there.”

“Elevator?”

“Is not working.”

Rob glanced at Emmy.

“It’s fine,” she said.

“Okay,” said Rob to the clerk, and they headed for the stairs.

Up to the first landing, the stairs were in pretty good shape. Above that level, the carpet was stained, rucked, and threadbare, openly torn in places, and the paper on the walls was peeling. The stairs ended at a small landing four flights up, where there were three numbered doors of plain wood. Room 24. It was on the left.

Rob switched on the light. The room was small. A double bed was pushed up against the opposite wall, which sloped inward from about halfway up. There was a small wooden desk with a plain chair next to an old wooden cupboard, and a small TV was attached to the wall above the desk on a bracket.

“Jesus,” he said to Emmy. “Was the room we had last year so shitty?”

“I think we had our mind on other things.”

“Yeah, but … this is definitely worse.” Rob closed the door. Emmy went into the bathroom. Rob opened the closet. Three twisted steel hangers hung inside. He closed it. A window was set into the sloping wall above the bed. Rob reached over and pulled back a grimy white net curtain. He looked down on a view along the wet, empty street.

Emmy came out.

“What’s it like?” he asked.

“It’s okay,” she said, which Rob sensed was putting it kindly. “I couldn’t find any towels. You happy or you want to move?”

Rob glanced around the room again. It was awful. But it was perfect. Who’d look for them here? “If you can bear it, we’ll stay.”

Emmy nodded.

There was a knock.

Emmy looked at him quickly. Rob moved cautiously to the door.

Another knock.

“Who is it?”

“Is me, Mr. Smith.”

Rob opened the door a fraction.