Lethal Affairs (16 page)

I can’t do this any more.
She’d come too close to sleeping with Hayley. Pierce would have to assign someone else. Being close to Hayley was driving her crazy, her instinct to protect her completely at odds with her assignment. Usually she had no problem carrying out her orders, because her targets more than deserved whatever justice the EOO or she personally might require. But Hayley certainly did not. Each day, Domino felt more unable to objectify her.

She knew, however, that even if she were able to convince Pierce to take her off the case, Hayley would be in even more danger. She had to stay with her and pray to hell she could keep her from getting hurt.

As much as she would like for them to have something together, as much as Hayley had touched her as no woman had before, Domino knew they could never have a future. Their entire relationship was built on a lie, and Hayley would never want to be close if she knew the truth, only more determined to expose her and the Organization.

Domino had been so many people in her life—from cleaning lady to CEO, from waitress to woman of influence—that she scarcely knew who the real person was beneath the chameleon exterior the EOO had created. Her existence resembled a life sentence, one from which she had no appeal and no escape. She had long ago accepted her fate, but Hayley made her question everything.

Maybe she couldn’t do much about her own future, but she would do her damndest to make sure Hayley had one.
She slipped the bone in her trousers pocket when Hayley unexpectedly emerged from the side door of the
Dispatch
building, more than a half hour before she was scheduled to get off work. Her sense of alarm increased when Hayley detoured from her usual route home to the highway for New York instead. But Domino did not immediately call it in to Pierce, as was expected.
Instead, she followed at a discreet distance, hoping Hayley wasn’t pursuing something that would make her conscience battle even more.

When she got to New York, Hayley lingered at Timmy Koster’s long enough to ascertain Manny had planned to recommend him because he was used to keeping secrets. Once she was relatively certain that the police would not be waiting for her upon her return, she handed him the DVD and headed to Manny’s apartment building. She hoped his senile landlady would remember her this time around.

The landlady cracked her door but kept the chain on. She was wearing faded pink pajamas beneath a red robe and matching slippers. Behind her, the television loudly blared a repeat of
The Golden Girls.

“Hi there. Edna, right? Sorry to be stopping by so late.” She tried to defuse the woman’s suspicious expression with her best hundredmegawatt smile, but she knew her charms had infinitely more predictable effect on men. “Do you remember me? Manny Vasquez’s niece?”

Recognition dawned on the woman’s face, and her frown faded. “Oh, yes. I remember you. If you’ve come to get his things, I need the back rent he owed before I can give ’em to you.”

Fat chance of that happening
. “I won’t have time to do that tonight, but I did stop by to see how much he owed,” she lied. “I’m trying to get his affairs in order.”

“He gave me a one-month deposit in advance,” the landlady said, removing the chain from her door. “And I need his things out of there so I can rent the place, so I’ll waive the last couple of weeks. You can have everything for the seven-fifty he owed for last month.”

“That sounds fair,” she answered, but she didn’t intend to drain her bank account. She thought fast. “Can you let me into his apartment again? I have power of attorney to settle his accounts, but I need to find his checkbook and insurance papers.”

“I can do that.” Edna fished in her robe for a bulky ring of keys. “Oh, and you need to clean out the stuff he kept in storage, too. There isn’t much—just a couple of boxes.”

Hayley was instantly alert. Sounded exactly like the sort of place a paranoid guy like Manny might want to keep something he didn’t want anyone to readily locate. “Storage?”

“Yes, dear, everybody’s got a secure space in the basement. Most of the tenants jam theirs full of all sorts of shit, but Manny’s was always nearly empty.” She picked at a piece of lettuce embedded between her teeth. “Funny, though, he wouldn’t give the space to anybody else. And I seen him go down there a lot to check on those boxes, like he was afraid someone would take ’em or something. Why he didn’t keep ’em in his apartment, with all those damn locks of his, is beyond me.”

Hayley fished in her wallet for a twenty-dollar bill. “Do you mind if I take that stuff with me now?” She offered the money to Edna. “I bet one of the boxes has the insurance papers I’m looking for.”

The landlady took the bill. “Fine by me, if it’ll get things settled quicker.” She led Hayley down a steep stairwell to a basement that ran the length of the building. Fenced-in cubicles held lawn furniture and ski equipment, golf clubs and other overflow possessions. As Edna had said, Manny’s held only two medium-sized cardboard boxes, both taped shut.

Ignoring a tug from her conscience, Hayley stripped the tape off the first box and looked inside. It was full of old case files. Most were duplicates, she realized, since the labels were in Manny’s handwriting and the contents were mostly Xeroxed copies of original police documents. But some looked like originals.

The second box held videotapes, cassettes, and personal items— letters, police cap, passport. It would take some time to go through it all, but a shiver of anticipation tore through her at the prospect.

She carried the boxes out to the Mustang and locked them in the trunk before she headed back to Koster’s to see what he’d come up with.

Domino considered breaking into the Mustang to see what was in the boxes Hayley had retrieved from Manuel Vasquez’s building, but decided the risk was too high. While Manny had lived in a run-down apartment complex, with a dark parking lot and tenants who lived in fear behind shuttered windows and double-locked doors, Hayley’s other New York stop was a decidedly more upscale and secure apartment “community,” which featured surveillance cameras, outdoor lighting, and a roving security guard in a golf cart. Tenants at this complex felt safe enough for barbecues on the patio and long walks on the grounds with their dogs, so the place was busy with people during the entire half hour Hayley spent inside.

But the biggest risk was the blue Chevy Malibu that had been following Hayley since they left Baltimore.
It was reasonable to surmise it was another private detective or similar flunky, hired by the mysterious “Joe Polizo” to watch Hayley. And if Domino’s encounter with the last one in the movie theater had been any indication, this one probably wouldn’t know much about the guy who’d hired him, either.
Bad enough she’d had to demonstrate some of her abilities on the other private detective. It wouldn’t do to have this one, or another flunky, report back that Hayley’s new girlfriend was now following her and taking items from her car. No, she’d have to wait for a better opportunity once they got back to Baltimore.
Domino was well aware she had veered from EOO protocol in not reporting in as soon as Hayley had taken the expressway to New York. And she’d compounded that digression by not calling Pierce with the news Hayley had returned to Manny’s apartment for something and that she was being followed yet again. But she knew to update the Organization with this evening’s activities would only make Hayley seem even more of a risk. Pierce might order her silenced immediately. And she couldn’t have that.
She wasn’t sure when her loyalty had started to turn. But she was now putting Hayley’s safety ahead of her commitment to the Organization. During her hours standing at the window in Hayley’s apartment the night before, she’d accepted that she was incapable of seeing her harmed and would do whatever she could to protect her.
Domino had no idea what Hayley was doing here or who she was seeing. The surveillance team monitoring Hayley’s home phone that day hadn’t sent her a report today, so evidently Hayley hadn’t discussed her plans for this evening, and Pierce didn’t know about them. And Domino couldn’t easily find out which of the dozens of tenants Hayley was visiting, since all the apartment entrances were located off interior hallways.
So she was forced to wait and wonder. But she caught sight of Hayley’s face in her binoculars as she exited the building and passed near one of the bright parking lot lights, and her heart sank. Hayley looked happy. Excited. This couldn’t be good.

Hayley drove back to Baltimore in a much more ebullient mood than she’d experienced on the trip up. She’d been worried about Koster’s discretion and hadn’t expected him to find anything significant. But he’d proved reliable and obviously very good at what he did.

He’d been able to enlarge and enhance the image of the assassin frame by frame, until he found something on her chest, the left side, just above her low-cut dress—a tattoo or birthmark, he thought, that she’d tried to conceal with makeup, not entirely successfully.

And the enhancement of the audio had been productive as well. She’d been able to listen in on the conversation between the assassin and her accomplice, and that had given her a name—Domino
.

It was something. And the impromptu trip to Manny’s apartment had also yielded unexpected results. She was so anxious to delve into the contents of the boxes in her trunk, she had trouble not speeding all the way home.

The digital clock on her dashboard read ten thirty. Her mind drifted to Luka, as it did with ever-increasing frequency. The note she’d left promised she would call “later,” but there had been no word from her, unless a message was waiting on her answering machine at home. It was probably just as well, she told herself, since she’d be wrapped up in going through Manny’s case files for the foreseeable future.

Still, it was the first time in years any woman had made her think about and want anything beyond the next big story. The memory of their fevered kisses the previous night made her ache for more. And she couldn’t stop wondering what made Luka struggle so with what they both so obviously wanted.

Senator Terrence Burrows was already in a foul mood when the call came. He’d been on a winning streak for the first ninety minutes of the evening’s high-stakes poker game, but he hadn’t had a decent hand since and was down nearly six thousand dollars.

When his cell phone rang, he was inclined to ignore it, then thought perhaps a few minutes away from the table might do something to shake his turn of bad luck. He stepped outside onto the terrace for privacy and a cigar.

Tonight’s game was in a private home in a posh section of DC, and though it had all the usual expected accoutrements for its wealthy and powerful players—the finest liquors and upscale call girls—the host had asked that pipes and cigars be taken outside.

“Yes, Jack,” he answered, after taking a long pull off one of the spicy Cuban Robustos he’d gotten from his favorite lobbyist earlier in the week.

“Your girl has been back to New York tonight,” Jack reported. “Took a couple of boxes out of the ex-cop’s place and stopped at another apartment building there for about a half hour.”

Terrence’s blood pressure escalated and he squeezed his cigar so tight it almost snapped in two. “What else do we know?”
“She talked to an old woman at the cop’s place—probably the manager. Couldn’t tell who she was seeing at the other,” Jack relayed. “And our guy was sure that someone else was following her. Too dark to make out anything about the driver, or get the plate, without getting made.”
This time the cigar did break in half, and Terrence dropped it at his feet. He started to pace and curse at himself for having screwed up. The journalist had managed to find one of the few people in the world who might have been able to tie him to those bastards. But was she smart enough to have figured out where he kept the tapes and files he had taken? He continued to pace and curse while he grabbed a fresh cigar from his pocket.
He had instructed Jack to make sure the men hired to take care of Vasquez also searched his apartment for audiotapes and case files related to the Castellano assassination, but neither turned up in a thorough search of the place—which was underway even before the ex-cop was officially pronounced dead in the ambulance.
What was she taking out of there, then? Could those fuckers have missed it?
Also very worrisome was the confirmation that someone else was keeping tabs on Hayley. He was certain it was the Organization, which could only mean she was getting close to something.
This whole affair had been a stupid gamble
.
It was looking more and more like he should bag the bad idea. Cut his losses and try some other way to get the EOO off his back.

t was a warm night, so Hayley changed into briefs and a cropped T-shirt and made herself an ice-cold martini as soon as she got back to her apartment. She jammed the enhanced DVD Koster had made for her into her player to study it again and set the boxes she’d taken from Manny’s storage space on the coffee table. But before she started what was certain to be a long night’s work, she carried her martini to the open window to let the evening breeze blow the perspiration from her heated body. The scent of hyacinth was in the air. As she stood there, looking out, it started to rain.

She closed her eyes and stretched, arching her back, and allowed herself to remember the evening before, how Luka’s kisses had inflamed and aroused her. The woman certainly had wonderful lips. Soft, yielding. But why hadn’t she called? Tamping down her disappointment, Hayley settled onto the couch with her martini and reached for her remote.

Who are you, Domino?
She watched the blond assassin coolly dispatch her second shot into Guerrero’s head, then share a tender exchange with her fallen accomplice. How could an organization turn a seemingly compassionate young woman into a cold-blooded killer?

As a reporter, she had certainly seen numerous accounts of females being used as purveyors of violence and death. But most were women who were also victims—coerced in the name of religious or nationalistic fervor into sacrificing themselves in a suicide bombing.