The Tempest (18 page)

She woke again much later, smelling bacon through the air vents. There was light now in the oak branches. Her mother had her breakfast going, the
Today
show on television. Matt, Al and Savannah.

“Morning,” Hunter said, coming in the kitchen in her sweats.

“How'd you sleep?”

“So-­so.” She got herself a Diet Coke and sat at the table. “I forgot how hard that little bed is,” she said, trying to sound lighthearted.

“Oh, really?” Her mother, dressed for work in a nice cream-­colored pants suit, frowned at her. “Well, it never bothered you when you were growing up.”

“I guess I had nothing to compare it with, then.” Hunter smiled.

Her mother cracked eggs for her, another custom. “So what are your plans? Can you stay with us one more night?”

“Actually, no, I can't. I have business in town this morning and then I need to get back.” Her mother stood stock-­still, looking at Hunter over her shoulder. “I'm sorry, Mom. This was probably ill-­advised timing on my part. My fault. But I'll come visit for a week when we finish all this.”

“Well. Okay,” she said, sounding more disapproving than disappointed. She brought Amy a plate of scrambled eggs and buttered wheat toast.

Hunter popped open her soda.

“I wish you wouldn't drink that for breakfast,” Joan Hunter said. “I'd like to see you start drinking coffee in the mornings.”

“Okay,” Hunter said.

“I think you're old enough now.”

“Yes, I probably am.”

Her mother gave her a kiss on the cheek before setting off.

“Just be careful,” she said.

“I will.”

Amy watched her mother pull out of the driveway, her old Camry disappearing around the corner. As she ate her eggs, she was struck by their role reversal—­Amy seeing her mother off to work like her mother had seen her off in school days.

W
ALTER
K
EPLER WAS
in the study of his beachfront condo reviewing travel itineraries when his attorney called from the parking garage to say that he had arrived. “Come on up,” Kepler said. “I'm in the Italian Room.” It was one of Kepler's small jokes. The Baroque painting in his little study was by Bernardo Strozzi, among his favorite artists, and so he called the room his Italian Room. Next door in the bedroom were small paintings by Joachim Patinir and Pieter Aertsen; he called that his Flemish Room.

“Come in.” Kepler nodded hello and ushered the smaller man in. They sat at the round mahogany table, Jacob Weber dressed in his attorney suit, smelling faintly of menthol shaving cream and breath mint. Kepler knew him well enough to know that the news was good, even though he appeared grim.

“Well,” Weber told him, opening his binder. “We've reached terms.”

“Good,” Kepler said. “All through the one man.”

“That's right.”

“And is he on board with the wording?”

“All of it. Yes.”

“Very good.”

Like a miracle. Anonymously.
Kepler's words, from the script.

“And you trust him.”

“Yes, of course. He seems to want this as much as you do.”

“I'm sure.”
Of course, he does.
They were in the game of suppressing emotions now, all around; emotions were a distraction at this stage, at best a waste of time. Kepler understood what his attorney must be feeling, though: Weber had been negotiating terms for three months now, walking a tightrope, and he was about to reach the other side. “It's in everyone's best interest to move quickly, then,” Kepler said, and Weber agreed.
Everyone, of course, except for Scott Randall.
The predator would be caught by surprise, as they had intended. Randall was still convinced the painting was being readied for a passage to the Middle East. Kepler smiled inwardly at that, while gazing somberly toward the Atlantic Ocean. It was easy to plant a story, although there was an art to planting one well. Kepler had worked up a new one, to keep himself busy and to keep Randall busy, too, in these final days. At Harlan Antiques in Dover, Delaware, which the FBI had been watching for several weeks now, he had arranged the delivery from London of a painting on Thursday afternoon measuring 50 inches by 63 inches—­which happened to be the exact size of the Rembrandt. Kepler had then placed an anonymous tip to the FBI's Stolen Art Division informing them that a stolen work, “possibly a famous painting,” was en route to the antiques store.

But the primary decoy was the story the CIA was banking on, which Kepler had helped set up one afternoon in Amsterdam: Ayman Al-­Bulawi, the terrorist middleman, representing the infamous financier and art collector Garrett Massoud.

“The question he wants to know now, obviously, is when,” Jacob Weber said. “We're saying tentatively on Friday.”

“They can do it with twenty-­four-­hour notice, though.”

“That's the understanding, yes.”

“Okay,” Kepler said. “Let's give them that, then.”

Jacob Weber frowned.

“Meaning overnight Wednesday,” Kepler said, to clarify.

Weber said nothing. Kepler watched his precise dark eyes taking this in. He'd anticipated that Kepler would change up the schedule, but probably not so dramatically. Kepler needed to shift hard now, in order to make this happen.

“Will that be a problem?”

“It's sooner than expected,” Weber said.

Kepler grimaced. “That's how it has to be, I'm afraid,” he said. “It's the only way we can make this work.”

“All right,” Jacob Weber said. “We'll do it, then. We'll make it work.”

“Good. I know you will.”

All three phases in a day; the truncated schedule lessened the possibility of sabotage; it also gave them the advantage of surprise. Kepler's risk was that he could lose $5 million, if things fell apart in the first phase. But that was
his
gamble.

“I'm meeting with Nick in a ­couple of hours. We'd like to commit to that.”

“All right,” Weber said. “Are you comfortable with everything else?”

Kepler knew that he meant Belasco. Weber didn't approve of Belasco, even though they were, in essence, all partners—­all in it together. But Belasco made Weber uneasy. “Yes,” he said.

“It'll be in the news Thursday, then.”

“Yes.”

Two days from now, everyone would be talking about the miracle.

“How about if we go over the details once more,” Weber said. “With your new time frame.”

O
N THE WAY
to her meeting with Calvin Walters in the town of Scattersville, Pennsylvania, Hunter took a call from Dave Crowe.

“How did it go with Bradbury?” he asked.

“Interesting.”

“She's a trip, isn't she?”

“I guess,” Hunter said. He sounded out of breath.

“She's gay, you know. I forgot to tell you that. Not that it matters.”

“No, it doesn't.”

The suburban traffic was heavy and moving faster than she had imagined. She switched lanes abruptly, almost rear-­ending a Mercedes, which had braked suddenly. She glanced at her rearview mirror, understanding why handheld cell phone use while driving had been banned in Maryland and many other states.

“It's interesting, though,” she said, “from what she told me, there's some question about whether or not Belasco—­the so-­called partner—­really exists.”

“He exists. The Bureau doesn't know much about him because we haven't had the resources to really pursue him. But he definitely exists.”

A car jerked in front of her and Hunter slammed on her brakes again, dropping the phone. “Dammit!”

The phone was on the floor now, sliding toward the accelerator. She could hear Crowe's voice talking to her but couldn't reach it.

“Dammit,” she said, trying to move it with her right foot, afraid it was stuck behind the accelerator pedal.

She slowed and undid her seat belt, reaching to the floor, feeling for the phone. Finally she managed to lift it between two fingers. The car behind her whipped into the left lane as she straightened up, its driver holding down on his horn. Hunter glanced over as he passed: a bald, red-­faced man. Hunter read his lips: “Learn how to drive!!!” it looked like.

“What's going on?” Crowe said, back in her ear. “Are you all right?”

“I'm all right,” Hunter said. “Traffic. Let me call you later.”

She got another call several minutes later, this one from her mother, but decided against taking it. She was pulling into the small town of Scattersville by then, and wanted to make sure she didn't miss her turns.

She drove past the small brick police station and made a U-­turn, pulling into a Wells Fargo lot. She parked there and listened to the message her mother had left for her: “Honey,” Joan Hunter said gravely. “I had a call for you, dear, here at work. It was very strange. A very strange man. He wouldn't give his name, but he said you were expecting him to call. He said, and this is a direct quote, I wrote it down: ‘Tell Amy Hunter she still has a day to extricate herself.' Do you know what that means? He wouldn't let me say anything or ask anything. So, I can only imagine.” She sighed dramatically. “Anyway, it was good to see you again. Call and tell me everything's all right. Okay? I love you.”

Hunter set her phone on the seat, willing herself not to think about it until she had finished her meeting with Calvin Walters.

 

Chapter Twenty-six

S
cattersville was an old suburban community about seventy miles from Philadelphia. It reminded Hunter of her own home town: fifties and sixties houses with small yards, sidewalks and telephone poles, mature oaks and elms, the downtown built around a four-­block Main Street.

Calvin Walters had worked for the city of Philadelphia for thirty-­six years before seeking a quieter life out here, battling a quieter type of crime. He was a lanky, bony man, with small patches of white hair on his head. He favored one hip as he walked, but there was a steadiness in his dark, bloodshot eyes, and something gentle and immediately likable about him.

“Nice town,” Hunter said, as she sat in the creaky wooden guest chair in his windowless office.

“It'll do,” he said. “It's the place where old police detectives go to pasture.” He showed her a playful smile. “So how can I help you?”

“Eddie Charles,” Hunter said. “I understand you knew him?”

He acknowledged it with a sideways tilt of the head.

“He died last September,” Hunter said. “His death was thought to be drug related.”

“Thought to be. That's what they tell me.”

“You don't believe it.”

“I don't.” He rotated his swivel chair and reached over the desk for a clipping on the bulletin board. The board was layered haphazardly with notes, photos and faded newspaper clips.

What he handed her was a photocopy of an
Inquirer
story.
SOUTH PHILLY DEATH
MAY HAVE CRIME TIES
was the headline.

There was a photo showing a wide-­faced African-­American man wearing a loosened tie, beaming at the picture taker. Hunter had read about the case before coming here. Eddie Charles's body had been found dumped in a small parking lot near Fifth Street and Jackson in the city last September 27. Hunter knew the neighborhood, long considered a “drug corner,” before the spread of cell phones.

The Philly police maintained a website that anyone could access with grainy videos of shoot-­outs, abductions, and other unsolved crimes, caught on cameras mounted around the city. Many of them were years old. Hunter had already watched and rewatched the website video of two men leaving Eddie Charles in the lot and driving away.

Detective Walters let the unedited footage run now on his computer. He'd had it queued up to go before she'd come in. They both watched: a car stopping, two men pulling from the trunk an object wrapped in a sheet. Dropping it in the lot and jogging back to the car. It was filmed from behind, almost a block away, much of the incident obscured by a store awning. The make of the car was impossible to determine.

“There was a baggie with crack residue in his pants pockets, but no drugs in his system,” Walters said. “They knew what they were doing. Knew where the cameras were.”

“So it was a setup.”

“That's right.”

He rocked back in his swivel chair, hands gripping the arms, studying Hunter. “I don't see a lot of similarity between what happened with Eddie and what you're investigating,” he said. She knew he'd probably spent a little time looking up Susan Champlain.

“Except both deaths seem to be something they aren't,” Hunter said.

He tilted his head to one side thoughtfully and showed a slow crescent of smile.

“The thing about that neighborhood,” he said, “was that it came to represent something to Eddie. That was a place Eddie'd climbed out of. He'd gone on. Started his own business, raised a family. We used to talk about it. In his mind, that was a place that didn't exist anymore. That's how he'd come to think about it. You can't choose where you're born, but you can choose where you live your life. He did.”

“So he was dumped there to make a point.”

“That's right.”

Someone had put Eddie Charles back in the neighborhood he'd escaped from, the place he'd risen above. Nullifying the rest of his life, in a sense.

“Who would want to make that point?” Hunter asked.

He showed her his right palm. “That's the question, isn't it?”

“I'd like to help answer it.”

The crescent smile emerged and quickly faded. “If it was easy to do, we'd've done it months ago, believe me. It was meant that way, not to be figured out. It was meant to send a message. To make a point.”

He reached up to tack the clipping back onto his bulletin board and sat down again.

“You knew Eddie Charles a long time, I understand.”

“Twenty-­five years.” The chair creaked when he rocked back. “His story was nothing unusual when I met him. Same story you hear a million times on the streets. Raised by a single mother, picked on growing up. Bumped into drugs for the first time when he was thirteen or fourteen. For a while, drugs gave him what he didn't have. An
in
ternal life,” he said, with a strange, drawn-­out emphasis.

“It's a cliché,” Walters went on. “But being a cliché doesn't stop it from happening. You try to warn these kids, tell them exactly what's going to happen to them and they all think, Nope, not me. And two years later, they've become the cliché.”

He sighed and leaned forward.

“Eddie had four or five arrests before he was eighteen. He made several attempts to straighten himself out and get clean in his twenties. Of course, that doesn't often take.”

“But it did with Eddie.”

“No, ma'am. Not for a while. Not until he got older and recognized how much of his life he'd lost, how many doors'd closed that were never going to open again. You get older, ­people stop giving you chances, stop looking at you in ways you want them to look at you. Eddie went past that point and his choices narrowed down to two: he could die, he could live.”

“And he decided to live.”

“Well, no,” he said. “I don't think I'd use the word decided. He got scared into it finally; and when he did, he turned his life around. But what
was
different about Eddie was that once he crossed that bridge, he never went back. Never. How did he do it? He got involved with better ­people, joined the church. And then he met a young lady, Maureen, who saved his life. Gave him a family. Helped him start his business.”

“So this isn't something he would have ever gone back to.”

“No, ma'am, that's what I'm telling you.”

“What happened, then?”

He rubbed a hand down his narrow face, feeling the contours of his bones. “What happened was, Eddie walked into a hole. He stepped into something he couldn't get out of. Drugs was one hole, but there's other kinds of holes you can step into.”

“What happened, exactly?” Hunter asked. “What was the hole, in this case?”

He winced and seemed to close up a little, leaning to one side. “The exact details of what happened with Eddie, I couldn't tell you. And I'm not going to speculate. All's I can say is that he must've met up with the wrong ­people. Or the wrong
person
.”

Hunter asked, “Did what happen to him involve organized crime?”

He flicked out his left hand dismissively. “I couldn't tell you that. Although—­” He paused and went on. “Eddie was an electrician. A very good one. He had a lot of clients. One of them was a fellow named Dante Patello. You may've heard about him. Or his father, Anthony. And also a fellow named John Luigi. So I guess you could say that put him on the fringes of it. But, no, I don't think those ­people were the ones who betrayed Eddie.”

“
Someone
betrayed him.”

“Yes, that's right, someone betrayed him.”

“Who do you
think
it was?”

“My business isn't to think,” he said, smiling at her. “It's to solve cases or shut up. In this instance, I'll take the second option.”

“Did it have anything to do with stolen art, what happened to Eddie?”

“May have.” The look on his face became more nuanced. “Are you asking me that or do you know that?”

“I'm asking.”

“Then my answer is, I don't know, I couldn't tell you. I've
heard
that. But I can't tell you if it's true or not.”

For the first time, he sounded disingenuous.

“When did you last hear from Eddie?”

“Three days,” he said. His eyes turned back to the bulletin board; Hunter looked at the crooked clipping: Eddie's face beaming. “Three days before they found him,” he said. “My feeling is . . . someone got the wrong idea about Eddie, and they planted a story about him that wasn't true. Not the Patello family, though, someone else. But that's all speculation on my part. I'm not going to talk about something I don't really know.”

“Do you know anyone else who might talk about it?”

“I'd have to think about that.”

He was pulling back from her, Hunter sensed. She opened her folder, then, and laid out Susan Champlain's cell phone pictures, side by side on his desk.

Calvin Walters leaned forward. He looked closely at the images, lifting them up one at a time.

“Could that be him?” Hunter asked, standing beside him.

Walters didn't answer right away. He picked up one of the three again and held it inches from his eyes. Then he set it down, and pointed a yellowed fingernail at something. It was the photo Susan had taken from beside the house. “You see that? That tower there?”

“Okay.”

“That's Revel,” he said.

Hunter moved in and looked closer. She didn't know what he was saying. “What's Revel?”

“Casino hotel. That's where the NFL player knocked his wife unconscious in the elevator.”

“Oh.” She looked again. “You're saying this is Atlantic City?”

“That's right. Revel was the tallest building in A.C. Still is, I guess. Although it shut down a couple of years after they opened. Which tells you something about Atlantic City.”

He turned the picture over, looking for some kind of ID. So the house
wasn't
in the Philadelphia suburbs, as Susan had said; it was on the New Jersey coast. Luke was right about that. The Rembrandt, then, had been in Atlantic City.

Walters slid his chair to the side and hit some computer keys, as if he were alone in the office. A minute later, a photo came on the screen.

It was Eddie Charles, wearing what appeared to be the same jacket as the man in Susan Champlain's photo, an aqua Member's Only, which looked a size or two small.

“That's him,” he said. “Eddie did business down there. Him and his wife. Mo. Rented an apartment there. Not in A.C., but in Margate. Although I couldn't tell you whose house this is.”

“Do you know who the other man is?”

“Nope.”

He leaned back and was watching her again, she realized.

“Tell me about your case,” he said.

Seated again, Hunter told him who Susan Champlain was, and how she had died. She told him how she'd been led to Helen Bradbury while pursuing leads about Susan's death and then what Bradbury had told her about Eddie Charles. Calvin Walters listened intently, his right ear cocked as if it helped him to hear better. She didn't say anything about Kepler or Belasco. Or the Rembrandt painting.

“I'm told there was a moral issue involved in what happened to Eddie,” Hunter said. “A moral story.”

“Yeah, that's right,” he said, showing his smile. He'd had this discussion before. “And that was the funny part about how Eddie ended up, and the part I still don't understand: his daughter says he saw the whole thing coming before it happened. Saw it as clearly as a train coming his way on a cloudless afternoon. It was that certain, to the point where there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Eddie told her exactly what was going to happen. And a week later, it'd happened. He was dead.”

He pushed the images together and gave them back to Hunter.

“But, the thing of it is,” he said, “Eddie didn't do anything wrong. All he did was he fell into a hole. And it wasn't a hole he dug. And therein lies your moral issue.”

“I'd like to talk with her,” Hunter said. “The daughter.”

He nodded. “Who else've you talked with about Eddie?”

“No one yet, other than Helen Bradbury.”

“She's something, isn't she?”

“I was going to talk with the son,” Hunter said. “I have an address for him in the city.”

“Cyril? Cyril won't talk to you. The daughter probably won't, either. But she might. Thelma knows the whole story. More of it than I do. But the thing of it is, even if she were to tell you anything, what good do you think it would do now? It's not going to do Eddie any good.”

“Except it might clear things up for his family. It might clear his reputation,” Hunter said.

“It might.”

He rocked back and forth very slightly, considering that. “I did a little background check on you, by the way,” he said.

“And—­?”

He shrugged and slapped his hands on the arms of the chair. “Do you have a card for me?” he said. Not in a dismissive way; in a way that meant he wanted a number, to call her back. Hunter pulled a business card from her pocket and handed it to him.

He got up, then, rubbing his hands on his hips, and began to walk her down the narrow hallway to the front door of the storefront police station.

“And if you do talk to Cyril,” he said, “don't mention that you talked with me. If you don't mind.”

“No. I won't.”

“All right. Just be careful,” he said, shaking her hand. There it was again. Outside, he looked up and down the street as if someone might be watching them. Hunter walked back to her car.