The Key Page 9

  I opened my mouth, but I wasn’t sure what to say. Asking Emma to tell Matthew to tell Peter I was sorry could hardly undo the damage I’d wrought. As apologies went, that would be setting a whole new standard for lame.

  “Rachel?”

  “We’re sort of in a fight,” I confessed sheepishly.

  “Excuse me?” asked Jane.

  “What could you possibly fight about with Mr. Too-Good-To-Be-True?” asked Hilary.

  “You’re being ridiculous about something, aren’t you?” asked Luisa.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “It’s pretty much all my fault.”

  And everything that had happened that morning came spilling out.

  “So,” summarized Hilary when I’d finished,“You’re never home, but you have plenty of time to flounce around with some guy from work. And meanwhile, Peter’s moved three thousand miles to do nothing but be supportive and sweet and cook for you and hack e-mail accounts for you and bring you Diet Coke in bed, and you pick a fight and accuse him of espionage?”

  I would be the first to say my behavior had been deplorable, but it all sounded even worse when she put it like that.

  “Why are you trying to drive him away?” asked Jane.

  “Because you were right. I’m scared.”

  “Of what?” asked Emma.

  “I don’t know, exactly. I mean, there are all the usual clichéd answers: I’m scared of losing my independence, and I’m scared of things not working out. But none of that excuses taking it out on Peter. Is it even fair to ask him to forgive me? Wouldn’t he be better off getting rid of me and finding some nice emotionally stable person to marry?”

  “You’re completely insane,” said Hilary.

  “That’s exactly my point,” I said.

  My friends were eager to settle in for a long session of psychoanalysis with me as their subject, but I insisted that we focus on more immediate problems instead. Emma left to pick up the food and call Matthew, but the rest of us gathered around the antique wooden farm table that loosely defined the dining area in the large open-plan space. Hilary refilled wineglasses while Jane pulled an easel over from the corner of the room that served as Emma’s studio. She tacked a large piece of drawing paper onto it, and then turned to us, marker in hand.

  “Why don’t we make a list of all the possible suspects?” she suggested brightly. “Then we’ll divide them up and investigate.” Jane taught math at a private school in Cambridge, and I suddenly had a vivid sense of what it would be like to be in her class.

  Hilary groaned. “Good Lord, Jane. We’re not your students, and this isn’t Scooby-Doo.”

  “But if it were, I’m not Velma,” I said.

  “I have the feeling it’s going to be a very long night,” said Luisa. She had crossed over to a window at the far end of the room, opened it wide, and lit a cigarette. I watched as she exhaled a stream of smoke out into the night.

  “Come back, Luisa. How are you going to see the chart from way over there?”

  “I’m trying to protect your unborn child from secondhand smoke,” she pointed out.

  “Oh. Thanks, I guess.” Jane turned back to the easel. “Now, where were we? The suspects. Or should we start with the victims? What do you think, Rach?”

  “Here’s the way I see it,” I said. “Gallagher was the primary target, but Dahlia knew something, or somebody thought she knew something, and that’s what got her into trouble.”

  “Knew what?” asked Jane, scribbling on the easel.

  “I don’t know. But that brings us back to why anybody would want to kill Gallagher in the first place. His current and former wives have the most obvious motives. They both were in his office the day before he died, so they had the opportunity. And now Naomi’s daughter probably gets an inheritance, and Annabel probably does, too, rather than getting divorced. Although, I’m not sure how much she’ll actually get.” I shared with them the tutorial Jake had given me on prenuptial agreements.

  “Women are more likely than men to use poison to murder people,” commented Hilary. “I read that somewhere. There’s something very personal—almost domestic—about poison. It implies being close enough and trusted enough to access food or drink, or knowing somebody’s habits well enough to poison him.”

  “But what about the work aspect of things?” asked Luisa. She crushed out her cigarette on the edge of the saucer she was using as a makeshift ashtray and rejoined us at the table. “You said yesterday that there was something off about this deal, Rachel. Could that be part of it?”

  “I guess it’s not out of the question, and I still think that there’s something wrong with the Thunderbolt buyout,” I said. I had already filled them in on the anonymous e-mail I’d received. “But, if somebody was trying to block the deal, and if the deal was dirty and Gallagher was involved, all he’d have to do is report him to the SEC. Poisoning him—well, it’s like Hilary said. There’s something sort of personal about it. Besides, it was a woman who pushed Dahlia, and as far as I can tell, I’m the only woman associated with this deal in any way.”

  “Then what would Dahlia know?” Luisa asked me. “If it was personal, rather than professional?”

  “She’s worked for him for a long time, so she knows both of the wives, and she probably ends up fielding a lot of his personal calls and correspondence, even though she shouldn’t have to. Maybe she saw some papers that showed he was planning on divorcing Annabel, something like that?”

  “But she said on her message that she wanted to talk to you about something she saw on the news,” Jane reminded me.

  “Maybe that was unrelated. Maybe she wanted to tell me about something else altogether?” I ventured.

  “Could be,” Hilary agreed. “But here’s what I don’t get. If it was one of the wives, how did she know to dress up like you when she went after Dahlia?”

  The door opened just then and I gave an involuntary shriek. Being on the lam was still new to me, and I was a bit jumpy.

  But it was only Emma, laden down with bags of food and, she said with a grimace, some “not-so-great news.”

  It had taken her awhile to locate a working pay phone “—I guess they just assume everyone has a cell phone now—” but she finally found one and got through to Matthew. He had another update from Peter: the police had returned to the apartment in the afternoon with a search warrant. It didn’t occur to me at the time to wonder why Peter seemed to be spending all day in the apartment.

  “A search warrant?” echoed Luisa. “That’s really not good. That means they’re serious.”

  “Rachel’s innocent,” Jane pointed out. “So there’s nothing for them to find.”

  “Well, sort of,” said Emma. “But I guess there was some stuff which, taken out of context, could be construed as evidence.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “They took your computer, for starters.”

  “That won’t be a problem. Peter seemed pretty confident he’d cleaned up the hard drive.”

  “It wasn’t just your computer. They also went through your study and found something interesting enough to box up everything in there and take it all away. Do you know what they could have found?”

  I didn’t have to think very hard to answer this. Mostly the files in my study held financial statements and medical records—it was all fairly innocuous, unless you counted the number of cavities I’d had filled. But in my rush to leave this morning, I’d also left my briefcase, complete with my “insurance policy,” the notebook I stored in its inside pocket, on top of the file cabinet. The most recent entries were pretty explicit regarding Gallagher’s treatment of me and my reactions.

  “That’s not all,” Emma continued. “They took your TiVo, too.”

  “My TiVo? There’s nothing on it but Peter’s Star Trek episodes and reruns of Dawson’s Creek. And my entire Forensic City backlog—oh.”

  “Oh, what?”

  “Forensic City. I didn’t see it, but Jake told me there’s an episode wh
ere somebody dies from a poisoned toothpick, sort of like how Gallagher died from the poisoned pencil.”

  “I saw that episode,” said Hilary. “It was really good. I didn’t figure out what happened until the very end.”

  “Was there anything else?” I asked Emma.

  “Um, yes. One more thing,” she said reluctantly.

  “What?”

  “Under the sink. In the kitchen.”

  God only knew what was in that cabinet—I’d been surprised simply to find usable dishwasher detergent the other night. It was probably all the same stuff that was there when I moved in. I’d always meant to sort it out, but I never really used the kitchen, so what was the point? I was fairly confident that my housekeeper kept it reasonably neat, but that was about the extent of it. “The woman I bought the apartment from was in her nineties. I have no idea what she might have accumulated,” I said.

  “Yes, well, she seems to have accumulated a nice big box of rat poison. With an active ingredient of potassium cyanide.”

  chapter sixteen

  I n the bleak wasteland that was my love life prior to Peter, I’d Googled the various romantic interests I’d had as well as the blind dates people foisted on me, and I’d been amazed by the wealth of information I’d found. For example, a few keystrokes had informed me that the charming venture capitalist I’d met at the Harvard Club was an avid collector of Beanie Babies, bidding them up aggressively on eBay. This knowledge promptly dashed any hopes I might have had for our future together, but better my hopes were dashed before we’d even started dating than after accidentally stumbling upon his Beanie Baby collection while looking for the bathroom in his apartment.

  The Internet proved an equally fertile hunting ground for matters less romantic in nature. We were up half the night running searches on the names and topics that Jane had detailed on the easel, including Naomi Gallagher and Annabel Gallagher. We also did some Googling of the victims for good measure. The Web yielded a stockpile of information that we used to shape our plan of attack: everyone—except for me, of course—was out the door by nine on Thursday morning, eager to pursue their designated leads.

  The good news was that cyberspace easily yielded recent reports on Dahlia Crenshaw’s condition; the bad news was that while she hadn’t been run over by the E train, she’d struck her head when she hit the tracks and had no memory of who pushed her. I was glad that she hadn’t been seriously hurt, but it would have been nice if she’d been able to clear my name.

  Naomi Gallagher turned out to be a relatively high-profile publishing executive—high-profile because she’d acquired and edited a bestseller about chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. “Maybe she knows about more targeted destruction, too,” Hilary suggested.

  We also discovered a picture of Naomi and her daughter at a function at Caldecott Academy, her daughter’s school, on the Caldecott Web site. “I know a woman on the faculty there,” said Jane. “I met her at a continuing education seminar. And teachers at private schools like that always know the dirt on the parents. Why don’t I look her up and see what I can find out?”

  Annabel Gallagher had a substantial presence in cyberspace. “Figures,” I said, when I scanned the results Google delivered, unconsciously echoing Naomi’s reaction when she’d encountered her successor.

  “What figures?” asked Emma.

  “She was a model.”

  “Vogue?” asked Luisa.

  “Victoria’s Secret?” asked Hilary.

  “No, she’s not tall enough for that sort of thing—she mostly did catalog work. But still, a model.” I wasn’t sure of the precise origins of the term “modelizer”—many credited Candace Bushnell and Sex and the City—but just because it was on TV didn’t mean it wasn’t true. In fact, a whole subculture existed in New York of men who were obsessed with dating models, regardless of whether they themselves were model material.

  However, the model in question here had been busily remaking herself as a socialite since she married Gallagher two years ago. Most of the references we found were about Annabel chairing benefits or otherwise attending charity galas. One reference was especially interesting, a gossip column blurb noting Gallagher’s absence from an Annabel-organized function and speculating about “trouble in paradise.” Personally, I didn’t see how domestic arrangements with Gallagher could ever have been described as paradise.

  “I’ll take Annabel,” said Emma with confidence. “I know the type, and I know where to find people who will talk about her.” Emma’s mother had been one of New York’s social leaders for decades, so it wasn’t surprising that she knew “the type,” although she herself shied away from the social limelight.

  Luisa nominated herself to try and figure out what Dahlia had seen on the news. “There’s a video clips service that my law firm uses to track mentions of their clients on TV. It records all of the main broadcast and cable channels. I can scan the news programs and figure out what Dahlia wanted to tell you—maybe it was something relevant to the buyout.”

  “That’s a lot of news,” I warned. “Local and national news on the major networks. And then all of the cable news channels.”

  “What time did she leave her message?”

  “Sevenish.”

  “So, it was probably the six-thirty national news on one of the networks. I’ll start there, and if I don’t find anything, I’ll broaden the search.”

  It sounded like a thankless task, but Luisa seemed willing to do it, and I didn’t have any better ideas.

  Hilary, meanwhile, volunteered to use her journalist credentials and connections to investigate the investigators. “I can find out more about the case they’re building against Rachel and see if they have any other leads.”

  “You just have a thing for police detectives,” Luisa said skeptically.

  “Two birds. One stone. Need I say more?” asked Hilary.

  There was a flurry of activity as they all prepared to leave, which made the loft seem extra quiet and empty once they’d actually left.

  Emma had made sure that the kitchen was well-stocked with essentials. I helped myself to a can of Diet Coke and some salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Usually I ate breakfast at the office, under Jessica’s watchful gaze. She probably wouldn’t have approved of this morning’s menu, but that was the least of my worries.

  I wandered around the apartment a couple of times and then stared out the window for a few minutes. I thought about getting back on Emma’s computer to try to do some more research, but I wasn’t sure what else to research. Nor did I have much of an appetite for Web surfing after an entire night spent online, searching every possible lead. Instead I turned on the television and flipped channels, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything that was on, and Emma didn’t even have TiVo.

  Thinking about TiVo made me wistful for my own TiVo. I hoped it wasn’t being handled roughly in police custody. I missed the rest of my belongings, too, especially my BlackBerry. It was strange to go so long without checking messages; I’d recognized that I was sort of compulsive about checking in, but I hadn’t realized just how compulsive until I was no longer able to. I felt twitchy and anxious, and while I could chalk that up to being a fugitive from justice, the BlackBerry withdrawal wasn’t helping. It was hard to suppress the sense that the world was moving forward without me.

  I’d checked the new e-mail account Peter had set up a couple of times during the night, but it had remained empty. Still, it couldn’t hurt to check again. It was the only thing I could check safely, and maybe checking it would stave off my withdrawal for a bit.

  I sat myself behind Emma’s desk and logged in to the account. I’d gotten so used to being disappointed that I was already steeling myself for an empty inbox. But instead I was rewarded with a message from Man of the People.

  I eagerly clicked it open, hoping he’d been a bit more explicit this time around.

  But he hadn’t written anything at all—the e-mail was completely blank.

 
It was a good thing I was alone, because my yelp of frustration wasn’t very ladylike. I scrolled down in disbelief, and then closed the message and reopened it. But there was still nothing.

  Who was this peculiar anonymous correspondent, and why was he bothering to correspond if he wasn’t even going to communicate? It was bad enough that it had taken him days to respond to my response to his initial e-mail, but to respond without actually responding just added insult to injury.

  I was about to hit Reply and give him a fairly scathing piece of my mind when I noticed I had missed something.

  The e-mail had an attachment.

  I was even gladder now that I was alone, because it would have been embarrassing to have to explain to anyone that I’d overlooked the attachment the first time around. I double-clicked on the little paper clip icon and opened the file.

  It was a photograph of three men, highballs in hand, standing in front of an orange-and-black banner that read Princeton Class of 1976, 25-Year Reunion. Actually, it looked to be a photograph of a photograph in a magazine, perhaps the Princeton alumni journal, because there was a white border around the picture and a caption underneath.

  I didn’t need the caption to recognize two of the men—they were slightly younger versions of Glenn Gallagher and Nicholas Perry. The third man was identified as Flipper Brisbane, apparently also a member of the class of ’76. He looked too old to go by a name like Flipper, but if he let himself be called Flipper in the first place he was probably beyond help.

  Man of the People had added his own caption to the photograph of the photograph: “They’re in this together,” it read.

  While he at least hadn’t sent me an empty message, and while the visual aid was nice, he still hadn’t told me anything new. He’d said “they” had done it before in his previous e-mail, and I knew that Perry and Gallagher had collaborated on the Tiger buyout, too. I would have preferred more information about what, precisely, they were in together now, and maybe even some input about if it could possibly be related to Gallagher’s death. I wondered if Man of the People even knew that Gallagher was dead.