The Kills (51 page)

When we
docked at the small pier on the southwest side of the statue, Mercer was
waiting for me. He lifted me down from the rear of the boat, embraced me, and
held me close against him. I couldn't control my shivering as I rested my head
against his chest.

"Let's
get her inside," he said, passing through a group of other cops and
security agents who wanted to be helpful. "You," he said, pointing at
a National Parks Service officer, "get into the gift shop and-"

"It's
closed for the day, sir."

"Get
in it. Bring me a sweatshirt and anything else that's dry and clean. I don't
care if you have to break in."

One of
the cops had covered me with his own windbreaker. It hardly mattered. Cold,
wet, and numb were feelings I was getting accustomed to this week.

We walked
into the entrance of Fort Wood, the War of 1812 garrison that formed the
statue's base, and Mercer guided me to an office door down a long corridor.

"What
happened?" Mike asked, hanging up the phone and flashing me one of his
priceless grins. "Hairdresser couldn't take you today? Look like that,
it's no wonder you can't hold on to a man."

There
were six other cops in the room, working phones and computers, now calling off
the search and alerting the patrol boats that I was safe.

"Tried
my best to hook a guy just half an hour ago," I said, knowing that if I
didn't keep up the banter, I was likely to dissolve into tears. "Did he
get away, too?"

"Glad
to see you haven't lost your sense of humor entirely, blondie. Nope. Mr. Hoyt
is in an ambulance on his way to the hospital. Mild concussion and a couple of
holes in his hands. The Port Authority cops picked him up on the Jersey
side."

"C'mon
next door," Mercer said. "There's an empty office."

"Figures,"
Mike said. "Coop's the only little girl I ever knew who preferred Captain
Hook to TinkerBell."

The parks
service guard returned with a large fleece shirt, a huge logo of Liberty's
torch on the front. I went inside first and changed into the dry top before
opening the door for Mercer and Mike. They wanted to know what had gone on this
afternoon with Graham Hoyt and how I had handled it. I gave them a clinical
version. The prospect of what could have happened on the river was
overwhelming.

"You've
got to call security at Hogan Place," I said. "The DA's squad has a
skeleton crew on Saturday. Get some of the guys to go down to my office. The
key to the file cabinet is in Laura's desk. Tell them to examine the Yankees
jacket that's behind the Tripping file in the first cabinet, second drawer-check
the pockets or, more likely, cut the seams open and look inside the
lining."

"Why?"

"Because
I'll bet that's where Paige Vallis hid the piece of paper that her father had
been holding on to for fifty years, thinking it might someday be his passport
to a fortune, if he could ever match it up with the gold coin it would
legitimize. The paper Victor Vallis took from King Farouk's palace."

Mercer
got on the phone while I settled in and warmed up.

"But
you'd told Graham Hoyt about the kid's baseball jacket, hadn't you? I remember
you telling him that you were going to give it back to Dulles. Why didn't he
figure it out?"

I shook
my head. "No, I told him the kid left the jacket at the hospital. It was
logical for him to think it was vouchered there that same day as police
property, as something that came out of the crime scene, maybe had the kid's
blood on it. I never mentioned that it was Paige who took it home from Bellevue
with her and held on to it for all those months."

"And
Paige put the document in your hands because she knew that her life might be in
danger."

"Probably
so."

Mercer
flipped his phone closed. "They're on their way down to your office.
They'll call me back as soon as they've checked the jacket."

Another ranger
knocked on the door and came in with a tray of hot coffee and sandwiches left
over in the cafeteria at the end of the tourist day.

Mike
stood behind me, massaging my shoulders and neck, trying to calm me while we
talked. "You got this all figured out? You sitting in that rowboat with
Hoyt and all of a sudden get one of those 'Holy shit!' moments?"

"I
think I've got a good idea of what was going on, don't you?"

"I
guess it all got into high gear in the summer of 2002. Sotheby's holds the
auction of the only valid Double Eagle known to exist and sells it for seven
million dollars."

"And
that," I said, "probably revived old rumors that had swirled around
expatriate types after World War Two about the most famous coin in history. The
myth of a second Double Eagle. The possibility that Farouk's delegation had
gotten two of the fabled birds out of the U.S. at the same time."

"You
mean, that had been gossiped about in 1944?" Mercer asked.

"The
feds can tell us that. It was such a great embarrassment to the government that
a group of the gold pieces had survived the presidential order to have them
destroyed, no one could put an exact count on how many there actually
were."

"So
who was aware of the second Double Eagle?" he asked again.

Mike
answered him. "Graham Hoyt must have known. He made a practice of
examining the lives of the world's greatest collectors, so he certainly knew
all about Farouk."

"I
got another piece of the puzzle today. It was Spike Logan who came to my house
on the Vineyard. He was working for Hoyt."

Mike let
go of my neck and came around to sit in front of me, waiting while I inhaled
some of the coffee. "What?"

"Figure
it out. Hoyt gave money to the Schomburg. You think it was an accident that
Spike Logan was interviewing Queenie Ransome? Graham Hoyt knew exactly who she
was, from his interest in Farouk. He hires Logan to get inside, to gain the
poor old dame's trust. He hires Logan mainly to learn whether that precious
piece of gold was actually one of the things she spirited out of the palace."

"Will
Logan talk to us, you think?" Mike asked.

I looked
over at Mercer. "Call Chip Streeter. When Logan showed up empty-handed
after ransacking my house during the hurricane, Hoyt realized he already knew
too much. Tell Streeter to expect what's left of Logan to wash up on South
Beach, near Stonewall, any day now."

"You
think Hoyt sent Logan to spook you during the storm?"

"Worse
than that. It was Hoyt who set me up all week, telling me how bad the hurricane
was going to be, why I needed to get to the house. You see," I said,
"I think he really believes I knew what Paige gave me. He thinks she
confided in me-since she had been so candid in telling me about accidentally
killing the man in her father's house. Hoyt's sure I had this priceless piece
of paper from the Treasury Department, and that once Paige was dead, I would
have kept it with me for safekeeping, even if I wasn't entirely sure what it
was."

"He
sent Logan to the house to get the document, and get rid of you," Mercer
said.

"So
then there's Hoyt's competition," I said.

Mike was
gnawing on one of the sandwiches. "That would be Peter Robelon. He knew
about the coin because his father was top dog in the British Secret Service,
attached to Farouk's group when the king was living in exile. Lionel Webster-the
guy who pretended to be Harry Strait-he's a mercenary who was hired by
Robelon."

"So
you had two professional teams working against poor, whacky Andrew Tripping,
who knew the whole story from his own Agency experience but just couldn't put
together a plan that worked," Mercer said. "You think his effort to
meet and date Paige Vallis was a setup?"

"From
the get-go. Same with Lionel's 'Harry Strait' character." I was certain
that was no chance meeting.

"And
Paige?" Mike asked. "You think she knew the whole story?"

"I
can't imagine she did. I'll give you some more homework, guys. You remember the
burglar who died in the struggle, the one she confronted when she got home
after her father's funeral?"

"Yeah."

"Get
phone records and bank records and anything else that left a paper trail. Bet
you almost anything that guy was hired by Graham Hoyt. Smart enough to pick an
Arab to do the dirty work. That way, if the plan failed, it would look like the
break-in was related to the consulting job on terrorism that Mr. Vallis was
involved in when he died."

"You
think he went in to steal the document that made the Double Eagle a legal
coin?"

"Yes,
I do."

"Then
you also think…" Mike was mulling my theory over as he chewed.

"I'll
bet that Paige found the paper on the burglar's body-maybe they even fought
over it when she interrupted him."

"She
realized what it was?"

"I'm
not sure that she knew its value or meaning, but she was smart enough to figure
out it was so important that someone might kill for it. Who knows, maybe her
father had explained its significance, figuring the stolen coin that it
referred to would eventually surface somewhere in the world. And that he-and
then Paige-was the only person who held the key to turning twenty dollars' worth
of gold into seven or eight million."

"Assuming
we find the document in Dulles's jacket, why do you think Paige gave it to you,
Alex?" Mercer asked.

I
shrugged. "I don't think she had anyone else in her life she could trust
at that point. The evening before she testified, she got a phone call from
Harry Strait. So the morning she came to my office, she was scared enough to
tell me something about him. But she didn't give me the baseball jacket
then."

"Wasn't
Strait in the courtroom, too?"

"Yeah.
She gets on the stand and not only is she facing Andrew Tripping, who was way
too interested in her father and his career for it to be coincidental, and
there's Strait again."

"That
ratchets up her fear factor," Mike said.

"So
then we went back to my office, and before she left, she made her decision to
pull out the Yankees jacket from her bag and give it to me."

"But
didn't even give you a hint that she's hidden something in it."

"She
was frightened, Mike, but I don't think most people cope with the fact that
their lives might actually be in imminent peril. She had been flirting with
this particular danger for months."

"Besides,"
Mercer added, "she was never too direct with Alex unless she was pressed
to be. She let everything come out piece by piece, when she was ready to tell
it. Right up to the minute she testified."

"Step
one was giving me the jacket for safekeeping. Getting it out of her possession
and into the hands of the law. Step two would be swearing that she no longer
had it to anyone who tried to get it from her over the weekend."

"Not
too successfully, obviously," Mike said.

"You
know, when Hoyt lured her out of her apartment by telling her she could see
Dulles, and then waylaid her in the laundry room," I thought aloud,
"I'll bet she pleaded for her life by telling him she had given me-sent me
is what he thought-the paper."

"Once
she admitted that," Mike went on, "she was as good as dead. He didn't
need her anymore."

"I
think she figured if someone hassled her over the weekend, she had a chance to
unload the whole story to me on Monday. She just didn't know how very dangerous
Hoyt was."

Mercer's
phone rang and he took the call. It was a short conversation but it confirmed
what we had already guessed. Paige Vallis had sewn the mistakenly issued 1944
document that made the second Double Eagle legitimate legal tender into the
lining of the pocket of Dulles Tripping's favorite Yankees jacket.