The Baker Street Letters (27 page)

“I shouldn't have got her involved,” Reggie replied at first. But then he bristled, glared at Mendoza, and said, “If authorities here had paid better attention to things, it wouldn't have come down to just me and her figuring the bloody mess out for you. It was Rogers that killed her. He realized he had a problem after I first went to see him. He had an ambush set up to take the map from me at the lake. But she tracked him down there first, thinking the wanker was actually going to help—and he panicked when she told him what we knew about the map.”

“And now Rogers is dead. Convenient.”

“There was a second man. At the reservoir, and in the tunnel.”

“So I hear.”

“You haven't found him?”

“No.”

“I'm sure you will in time. If he was at the center of the blast, he might be a bit dispersed at the moment.”

“Uh-huh. What's the fellow's name? I'll check with missing persons.”

“I don't know his name. A white male, fifties, something above six feet, one ninety or thereabouts.”

“Narrows it down to a million or so local suspects.”

“Rogers forced Ramirez to alter the map, and this man paid Rogers to do it. His involvement stems from that.”

“Ahh, yes, the map. Well, you may have something there. Motive, anyway, for someone, if you can prove this wasn't just some colossal screwup.”

“Exactly.”

“Brilliant. Where is the map?”

“On the tunnel platform, last I saw,” Reggie said reluctantly.

“It was in the tunnel. With the great big fire.”

“Yes.”

“Uh-huh. Good luck with that one,” said Mendoza, and he stood. “I'd ask you not to go too far—but I don't think that's going to be a problem.”

Mendoza exited.

Reggie sat up and made an assessment.

The head pounding recurred only when he moved; when he was still, it receded to a generalized ache.

So that was a plus.

He knew he'd have to lift his leg to get it out of the sling. He tried that tentatively, and his right knee responded with swollen, radiating pain.

He was about to try again—but then the bedside phone rang.

It was a single room; the call couldn't be for anyone else.

Reggie picked up.

“Hello, Heath,” came Wembley's voice, annoyingly and, Reggie presumed, deliberately cheery. “Are you well?”

“Quite,” said Reggie. “Yourself?”

“In the pink.”

“Glad to hear it. How can I help you?”

“I'd like to see the three of you back here for a little chat, Heath. Miss Rankin. You. Your brother.”

“Not a good time,” said Reggie.

“They tell me Miss Rankin is more than able to travel, and you and your brother can be moved in a day or two. From what I understand, you're making rather a mess over there anyway. I'll get extradition if I need to,” said Wembley.

“Give us two days then,” said Reggie. “I doubt they'll let Nigel out before that. I'll see you myself day after tomorrow. If you still need to talk to Laura or Nigel after, you'll know where to find them.”

“Fair enough,” said Wembley, now sounding a bit suspicious. “Just be here.”

“Thank you,” said Reggie, and he hung up the phone.

He took a breath, clenched his teeth, and readied himself again to try to get out of bed.

This time he managed it. He raised his leg cleanly up and out of the sling.

And then his foot came down with a little more force on the floor than he would have preferred. He choked back a scream. He stood and waited for a wave of nausea to subside before finding his clothes.

Reggie stepped into the corridor, then was dizzy again, and he leaned for a moment against the wall and tried to think.

Wembley had revealed more than Mendoza had about the state of things. Laura must have gotten out cleanly, but Nigel must be injured.

Reggie looked to his right, toward the nurses' station. The attending nurse was busy on the phone, looking the other way. It was just as well. There was no telling what instructions Mendoza might have left.

Reggie straightened, tried to ignore the pain in his knees, and began a stroll, or something like it, down the corridor. He pushed open the door of the first room. There was an elderly woman, sleeping, and an empty bed.

He went on to the next room, where a balding, sixtyish man announced personal surgical details of which Reggie would just as soon have remained ignorant.

He moved on to the next room.

And there was Nigel.

He was lying flat out in the bed, unconscious. A nurse was tending to him.

“What's his condition?” Reggie asked.

“A concussion.”

“When will he come out of it?”

“You should ask the doctor that. But I've seen worse.”

“He's had one before,” said Reggie.

“Sure, honey,” she said helpfully. “Who hasn't?”

“Was there a woman visitor here earlier?” asked Reggie.

“Yes, he seems to be a popular guy.”

“Tallish redhead, highly freckled?”

“The first one. The second was medium, Hispanic, also very pretty. She said she had to go see her father. In the burn wing.”

The nurse exited.

Reggie sat on the plastic hospital guest chair. He stared at Nigel and tried to push back a memory of thirty years ago—when he'd waited outside a surgery while his distraught mother and a doctor peered into Nigel's eyes, assessing the results of a concussion that Reggie had caused.

In relating that incident years later, their mother, unable to
deal with the knowledge of one son hurting the other that way, had transferred that guilt onto one of Nigel's chums, and in family legend, that's where it had remained.

Making it all the more awkward for Reggie, hearing the story again and again at family events.

This one isn't my fault, he reminded himself. Nigel came out here against his instructions.

But perhaps because of his lawyer's training—or perhaps in spite of it—Reggie looked back one step in the trail of proximate cause.

He had given Nigel the menial position that, as it turned out, included the job of answering the letters.

Yes, but there was no way he could have known Nigel would do such an extraordinary thing with them. So Reggie was not the cause.

He looked yet another step back—Nigel had taken the job because of his troubles with the Law Society.

But those troubles were of Nigel's own making, so Reggie was not the cause there, either, and it was time, he knew, to be done with that.

But then Reggie looked back one more step, to what had preceded Nigel's gloriously successful—and then completely disastrous—first trial.

And what had preceded that was Laura's breakup with Nigel.

And the lover she had dumped him for was Reggie.

That was not proximate cause, either; no court on either continent would say so, there were too many intervening events and too much exercise—and often foolish exercise—of Nigel's free will in between.

But Reggie's mind was not a court of law, and as he sat by his brother's bedside, there was no jury to provide exoneration.

Mercifully, now his mobile rang.

It was Ms. Brinks.

“I have your list,” she said.

“Which list is that?” said Reggie.

“Clients of O'Malley and Associates,” she said. “Remember, you asked for—”

“Yes, I remember,” said Reggie. “What did you find?”

Ms. Brinks began to rattle off a long list of people and corporations known to be clients of that law firm.

Reggie dismissed each in turn; he could see no possible connection for any of them.

“Perhaps it would help,” said Ms. Brinks, “if I knew what sort of connection you are looking for.”

“Someone, or some thing, with some likelihood of communication, however indirect, with me, Nigel, or Laura.”

“Oh,” said Ms. Brinks. Then, after just a short pause, “Well, there is one more thing, then.”

“Yes?”

“I . . . just don't know whether I should say.”

“If you've got something, Ms. Brinks, you'd better spit it out.”

“You asked me to look into Lord Buxton. So I did. And you were right, there's a connection. I mean, indirectly.”

“Say that again?”

“He owns one of the companies represented by O'Malley and Associates. And . . . I just don't think it's my place to say—”

“Ms. Brinks—”

“Well, in the
Star
a few days ago, there was an item about him in the company of Miss Rankin. In New York City, some premiere or another. Now, I don't want to be presumptuous, sir, but the indirect connection I'm referring to is—”

“Thank you, Ms. Brinks. I will connect the dots.”

“You're welcome, sir.”

Reggie hung up the phone.

Buxton.

Could it really be? Could Buxton be behind any of it at all?

That would be perfect. Laura would drop the man like a stone.

Reggie sat alone in the room for several moments more, contemplating the possibilities. And then the door opened, and he looked up with a start.

It was Laura.

She entered the small hospital room, her dark red hair spilling down over her neck and exposed shoulders, making her seem unusually vulnerable. She looked across first at Nigel, unconscious in the bed, and then she appraised Reggie.

“Where does it hurt most?” she asked.

“My head and neck and arms and knees,” said Reggie. “Nothing more. What about you?”

“Not a scratch,” she said. “Nigel saved the Saint Bernard, you know. It seems the blast put it airborne, and Nigel cushioned its fall, so to speak. Heaths are apparently excellent buffers.”

“Bloody hell,” said Reggie.

“And then it cushioned mine. I'll be sneezing now for a month, but fair trade.”

For a moment they both sat in silence, looking at Nigel. Reggie thought he caught Laura glancing surreptitiously over at Reggie watching Nigel, but she looked away again and said nothing.

Reggie spoke first.

“Wembley is getting ready to drag us all back to London about Ocher,” he said, “with you first on the list. And Mendoza still wants to hang something on Nigel here if he can. We need to establish a connection between Ocher and what happened here and make everyone see it.”

“Sorry,” said Laura. “I was wandering. Don't know quite why. How do we do that?”

Reggie hesitated. He had avoided this earlier. He couldn't avoid it now.

“We need to identify the inside source,” he said. “The person who put up Nigel's bail.”

“Yes, I recall you mentioned that. But who is it?”

“You might not like this.”

“I can't imagine why. Tell me.”

“Your friend Buxton,” said Reggie.

For a brief moment, Laura just stared. “You can't be serious,” she said.

“He has the funds to have done it.”

“Reggie, what possible motive would he have?”

“I don't know, exactly. Not yet.”

“Then why are we even discussing him?”

“Laura, he owns the majority interest in a company that is represented by the same law firm that posted Nigel's bail.”

Laura looked away, puzzled over that for a moment, then looked back.

“That's it?” she said.

“Sorry,” said Reggie. “Didn't want to present bad news about your friend, but there it is.”

“Reggie—if you draw lines from all of Robert's acquisitions to all their subsidiaries, the amazing thing will be if you discover a major law firm that does not represent one of his interests somewhere. And you know this, you know it perfectly well. Why are you even bringing this up? And why do you keep saying ‘friend' as if in quotation marks?”

“It's just beyond credibility,” said Reggie, “that he would fly out here just to get rid of all the thees and thous in
The Taming of the Shrew
.”

“It's not just ‘thees' and ‘thous,' if you must know. He's decided to go ahead with the movie spinoff, and he came to set that up. There will be a quick promotional shoot at the studio in Century City before I go back to rehearsals.”

“I see,” said Reggie, with as little inflection as he could manage.

“Usually when you say it that way, you don't,” said Laura. “But just tell me this—how is Robert supposed to have known that Nigel even was in jail, or about any of what we've been doing at all?”

Reggie didn't answer at first. He was digging a hole for himself, and he knew it. He was well past the clay and about to drill into bedrock, and his better sense told him to stop—but he didn't.

“Well, bloody hell, Laura, you've been spending your evenings with the man, what in blazes am I supposed to think?”

“If you can even imagine that I would be so foolish and untrustworthy as to confide—”

“No, I don't, I don't think that at all.”

“But you thought it, you did think it, you said it just now! If I didn't think it would break some stitches somewhere, I'd slap you so hard your teeth would rattle into the next millennium!”

She stood and turned toward the door.

“Laura—”

“Reggie—for all this time you've waffled and I've waited. Now you think you see a threat come on the scene and suddenly you think it's me that might have a shag on the side?”

She went to the door without waiting for an answer. But then she paused and looked back.

“You can call me,” she said, “when your brother wakes up. Or when you do.”

And then she was gone.

Reggie remained there beside Nigel's hospital bed and wondered if Laura had meant it literally.

Then something occurred to him, something so obvious that he realized that something other than rational logic must have been running him of late.

If the inside source was not Buxton, who was it?