The Guise of Another (10 page)

Alexander's trip to New York had been a great success. He found Jericho Pope, the imposter who stole the life of James Putnam. He managed to reopen the investigation into the death of Richard Ashton, an investigation that might just answer the question of why Pope ran to Minnesota. And he found Billie Rider, a kindred soul who, like him, saw wickedness in the penumbra of unanswered questions.

With his New York City mission complete, Alexander returned to Minneapolis on Friday as planned.

He drove home from the airport and parked in the driveway of his house in the East Calhoun section of Minneapolis, an older, upscale neighborhood on the southern edge of Uptown, a section of the city known for its confluence of yuppies, hipsters, artists, and leftover old money. Alexander and Desi had moved there at her insistence; she wanted to be in a neighborhood that laid claim to the prestigious Lake Calhoun.

Alexander approached the house as he might approach a crime scene, his senses heightened, his steps light, his eyes searching for signs. He almost felt surprised when he found his garage empty, as it should have been. He stepped into the house, clicked the door shut behind him, and paused. Listened. Nothing. “Desi…I'm home.” Still nothing. He slipped his shoes off and walked through the house, trying not to disturb the air around him, as if the settled dust itself might tell him what he wanted to know.

He opened the dishwasher, and in the top rack, among the other clean dishes, he found two wine glasses. No clue as to whether the glasses came from two separate nights or a single night with a guest. He looked into the wastebasket and saw the empty Cabernet bottle. Desi liked wine, so it proved nothing.

He peered into the guest bedroom. He didn't expect Desi to sleep there in his absence. With him out of the house, there would be no reason for her to sleep there, and he saw no sign that she had.

He went to their bedroom and looked at the bed. It didn't look slept in either. He pulled the covers back and ran his hands across the sheets. They seemed fresh. He could smell fabric softener, which meant that she had laundered them between his leaving for New York and his return. If she had brought a man to their bedroom, she would have been smart enough to wash the sheets afterward. But maybe they simply needed washing.

He went to the closet and looked in the clothes hamper. He lifted out a few garments, until he came to a shirt he had worn the day before he left for New York. She hadn't washed clothes in the past three days. He started to put the clothes back but then noticed something—not what was in the hamper, but what was missing from it. Desi's blouses. She had a line of blouses that she wore under her suit jackets. A few were dry-clean-only, but most of them found their way into the laundry hamper after the workday. There were no blouses in the hamper, at least none above his shirt, which meant that she hadn't deposited a blouse into the hamper since he left for New York.

He checked her dry-cleaning bag and found no blouses there, either. He squatted down, putting a hand on the floor to steady himself. How many possibilities were there to explain the lack of a blouse in the hamper? He could come up with only two, and neither looked good for his marriage. Either she hadn't been going to work, or she had been going to work but not coming home afterward. In either case, the next question would be, where had she been going?

Alexander pulled out his cell phone and dialed Desi's office, using the *67 prefix to keep his number private. Desi's market-research firm employed around a hundred and twenty people, and only a handful knew him by sight. As the phone rang, he tried to recall names and terminology that he had heard Desi use over the years.

“Castro, Docherty Marketing. How can I help you?” the receptionist's voice came through clear and professional. Alexander had
never met the receptionist, but he had called there enough over the years that he disguised his voice this time.

“Desiree Rupert, please.”

“I'm sorry, she's not in. Would you like her voicemail?”

“Hmm.” Alexander had always been a fast thinker, able to conjure a believable cover story out of dust in the time it took most men to blush with guilt. “That's not good,” he said.

“Sir?”

“This is Christopher Kennedy.” Alexander was certain that he'd heard Desi use that name before. A VP from the Chicago office, he thought. “Desiree was supposed to get the Hormel Brand Loyalty Study to me this week. And…well, it's Friday and…”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Kennedy, but Ms. Rupert has been out sick since Wednesday. Can I put you through to her assistant? Carrie might know if the report's ready.”

Alexander's shoulders slumped. Out since Wednesday—the day he left for New York. He looked around his bedroom at the undeniable absence of a sick wife.

“No,” he said. “It can wait. No need to disturb her if she's sick.”

He hung up and sat on the edge of the bed as unsettling thoughts swirled inside his head. Had he become
that guy
? The guy who never saw it coming? The guy who bathed in comfortable ignorance and blind faith as his marriage falls apart? He was a detective, for God's sake. It was his job to notice things.

When did it start—the dissatisfaction? He thought back to the day they met. He was the bad boy from the world of the working class, the guy she brought home to shock her parents. Had their marriage been a dare? A fuck-you to her family? Later, when he bulked up and dressed in denim and T-shirts to work the streets, she couldn't get enough of him. He was her hero.

Then he got shot.

Is that when things began to change? The cane. The limp. They couldn't make love for the better part of a year, at least not in a way that didn't hurt his hip or leave her restless.

Alexander replayed their life since the bullet. Like watching a play from the wings of the stage instead of from the mezzanine, he saw the past few years from a different perspective. It was Desi who wanted him to climb that ladder, become a captain. It was Desi who pushed him to obtain a higher status, a higher salary. Together they earned enough to pay their bills, yet Desi found fault with that existence. “None of my friends are just paying their bills,” she would say. Wasn't it Desi who insisted on this house, in this neighborhood? Wasn't it Desi who continually added to her wardrobe and jewelry? Wasn't it Desi who insisted on meeting her coworkers every Thursday evening for wine?

Alexander closed his eyes as a new question landed hard on his chest. Had she been drinking wine with coworkers? Or had she been with him—the man in the nice suit? He clenched his fists as the depth of his ignorance burned its way up his throat. He remembered the hint of wariness he felt back when she first started her “wine nights.” How she came home looking slightly tousled. How she acted toward him, a degree or two colder than normal. He hadn't imagined that, had he?

Had she become
that woman
? The woman who whispered lies to her friends, making her husband out to be a monster in order to justify her own treachery. The woman who says “it just happened”? Is this what they had become?

He expected to feel a surge of emotion wash over him. He wanted to erupt with anger or sadness. He needed to feel something. He braced for it, but it never came. No anger. No sadness. It felt as though a great chasm had peeled open inside of him, the abyss swallowing his ability to feel. The only emotion remaining was a burning need to get away, leave the house before she returned to find him in this state.

There would come a time, soon, when he would lay the evidence on the table in front of Desi and make her face her lies. When that day came, he would have to be ready for her decision. Would she ask for his forgiveness or pack her bags? And did he prefer one alternative over another? Could he even forgive her if she asked for his forgiveness?

He pushed those thoughts away for now. He didn't want to think about the answer. He had time to prepare for that moment, and by
then, he would know. Until then, he would mirror her icy politeness back to her. If she could live with duplicity, so could he—at least until he had the proof in his hand.

He had been staring at their dresser, letting his thoughts bounce loose in his head, when he noticed something else out of place, a small, porcelain dish atop the dresser where Desi kept some of her jewelry. There, peeking out from between two pearl earrings and a gold rope necklace lay her wedding ring. How long had it been there? Alexander thought back, trying to remember ever seeing it absent from her hand. He reached out to pick it up, but stopped when he noticed that his hand was trembling. He squeezed his fingers into a fist to stop the shake.

He left the ring where it lay and made his way back to his car. He didn't have a plan. No destination. He didn't know where to go or what to do. A jumble of emotions simmered just below the surface, waiting as he drove his car, moving with the current of the traffic. He told himself that he would follow the bumper ahead of him, think about nothing in particular until things settled down.

Yet, even as he told himself that he would drive without a compass, his car moved inexorably in the precise direction of Ianna Markova's apartment.

Also on Friday morning, the private jet carrying Drago Basta landed at a small airport in Teterboro, New Jersey—just another business traveler, returning home for the weekend. He waited patiently in line to display his passport identifying him as Walter Trigg. The passport was spot on, one of the benefits of Patrio's close ties to the heart of federal power. As a defense contractor, Patrio handled dirt that the State Department or Department of Defense couldn't touch. That opened doors for men like Wayne Garland, giving him direct access to things like counterfeit passports and federal databases.

The TSA agent at Teterboro studied the passport and driver's license, and said, “Welcome back, Mr. Trigg.” A town car brought Drago to an unremarkable, five-story office building on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the kind of building that might have been a lackluster hotel in a former life and now housed the home office of Patrio International. The exterior slumped with decades of neglect, but once inside, it was like stepping out of Dorothy's farm house and into the land of Oz. Garland had spent lavishly to make the interior a rival of any modern office.

Garland's personal office, a monstrosity that took up half of the top floor and looked like the set from
The Great Gatsby
, stood as a perfect testament to the man's unchecked hubris. Garland stood to greet Drago as though they were old fraternity brothers who hadn't seen each other in years. In fact, it was only eight months ago that Garland sent Drago into the mountains of Afghanistan to extract tribute from a particular tribal chieftain who forgot the rules of the game.

Lots of money had been delivered to that chieftain in exchange for his allegiance to the American effort, money that would never appear on any ledger or in the minutes of a congressional committee meeting.
They had made a simple arrangement: Garland, through Patrio, would have the money delivered to the chieftain, ostensibly to improve the lives of his people and persuade them to undermine the Taliban. In return, the chieftain would show his appreciation by giving a percentage back to Garland—not Patrio and not the United States, but to Wayne Garland—deposited into a secret account in Switzerland. The chieftain, however, didn't reciprocate as he had agreed.

Garland sent Drago to change the man's mind.

Drago flew to Afghanistan, crossed mountains full of hostile inhabitants, and slipped into the chieftain's house. He killed three bodyguards on the way to the chieftain's bedroom, where he found his prey. He stuffed a scarf into the man's mouth before cutting off his pinky finger, ring and all. Drago had memorized enough Dari to whisper in the chieftain's ear, “Pay your debts.” Drago brought the finger and ring to Garland, who later mailed the ring back to the chieftain with a cryptic thank-you note for the payments received.

“I'm glad you could come at such short notice,” Garland said, as he closed the thick office door behind Drago. “I couldn't tell you over the phone because…well you never know who's listening these days. It's about our friend from the yacht.” Garland sat down behind his desk and motioned for Drago to sit in the chair. Drago didn't sit.

“Our friend has surfaced?” Drago asked.

“Not yet,” Garland said. “I got a call from a detective in Manhattan. She said she's reopening the case on the disappearances of Richard Ashton and Jericho Pope.”

“Did she say why?”

“No. All I know is that she's coming here this afternoon to talk to me about it.”

“Who is she?” Drago asked.

“Her name is Louise Rider. I did the research myself. I didn't want anyone else knowing about this. The wrong person knowing our business is what got us into this mess to begin with.”

Drago snarled his upper lip just enough to show that he didn't appreciate the insinuation that he shared some of the blame for not
killing Jericho Pope all those years ago. Drago had learned a valuable lesson that night. He had learned never to allow anyone else to interfere with his planning of a mission. The half measures that Garland insisted upon—the yacht, the hookers, the presence of a captain and first mate—led to the massive fuckup. Pope had become a piece of unfinished business, a singular failure that ate at Drago and kept him tethered to the loathsome Garland.

“So tell me about this Detective Rider,” Drago said.

Garland pulled a file from his top drawer and opened it. She's twice-divorced, no kids, both parents alive and living in New Jersey. She's been a detective for six years, mostly general crimes. Nothing in the file tells us whether we can buy her off or not.”

“‘Buy her off ’?” Drago repeated, with a trace of indignation in his voice. “Didn't you learn your lesson with Ashton? You Americans throw money at every problem without thinking about how it only creates more problems. If you try to bribe this detective and she refuses, she will know that she is on the right path.”

“Then, we'll just have to dispatch her,” Garland said.

“And by
we
…are you going to pull the trigger?”

“We each have our particular talents,” Garland said. “And I pay you handsomely for yours.”

“If you will not be killing this detective, what talent are you bringing to the table?”

Garland sat up in his leather chair, his belly pressing hard against the single button of his suit jacket. He pointed a crooked finger at Drago, but Wayne Garland didn't say a thing. His face flushed red for a moment, but he let his finger settle back into his palm. “Drago,” he said, “we have a lot at stake here. If this thing gets stirred up, there is no place on Earth either one of us could hide.”

“So you think we should kill the detective?”

“I do.”

“No,” Drago said. “We will hear her out—see what she knows. You will get her to tell us what new piece of information has brought her to see us after all this time.”

“But what if she knows too much already?” Garland asked. “What if she has pieces of the puzzle but just hasn't put it together yet? We have to do what needs doing. We have to make sure this stays buried.”

Drago watched as a trickle of sweat dribbled down Garland's temple. He could see a gray fear in the folds of Garland's skin, and the frailty of self-preservation hiding behind the man's eyes. Drago smiled to ease Garland's fears, and said, “When the time is right, I will do what needs to be done.” And then, in his thoughts, Drago finished the sentence,
Even if that means killing you
.