THE DEAL

Twenty minutes.

That was all the time I had to hide a body and keep an appointment with a killer.

I knelt beside Ross. I did not check for a pulse. I told myself there was no time, but the truth was simpler: I did not want to know. I took him under the arms and dragged him behind the desk, folded him into the dark hollow beneath it, and pushed his chair in after him.

The brass scales lay on the carpet where they had fallen.

Then I did something I could not have explained at the time. I picked them up with my gloved hands, wrapped them in my handkerchief, and slipped them into my coat pocket.

I locked Ross’s door with Lancy’s skeleton key, stopped at my office for an overcoat and a black tennis bag, and took the elevator down. In the lobby, I dropped Rachel’s FedEx envelope into the overnight box. Brandon’s went in after it.

The third copy stayed with me.

Roxy’s Cadillac smelled of vinyl and spearmint gum. I moved the towel-wrapped bundle from the trunk into the tennis bag, set the manila envelope on the passenger seat, and drove to the Hamilton Building.

She was there.

Eli stood at the front entrance in the black coat and hat she had worn in the cathedral, waiting for a man who was lying under his own desk.

I parked behind the building and came at her on foot, slowly, from behind. When I was close enough, I rolled the envelope into a tight tube and pressed one end hard against the small of her back.

“Don’t move.”

She didn’t. She didn’t turn, either.

“I know who you are,” I said. “I know who pays you. As you’ve probably worked out, I’m not Ross. Now, either we make a deal, or I bury you.”

She turned around slowly. If she was surprised to see me, she did not give me the pleasure of showing it.

“I always knew you were stupid, Xavier. I didn’t realize you were this stupid.” She glanced at the tube in my hand. “Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with?”

“A corrupt assistant district attorney who—”

“You moron.” She said it almost gently. “This isn’t about me. I don’t work for myself, and I certainly don’t work for your three-hundred-dollar-an-hour law firm. People like you and me are pawns, counselor. I work for people who stopped recognizing boundaries a long time ago. Financial or moral.” She paused. “You’ll be dead before the night is over.”

“Is that a threat?”

“It’s a forecast.” She tilted her head toward the street. “Why do you think I chose this place? Did you really believe I’d meet anyone without protection? There’s a man in the building across the street, and right now he’s looking at your pretty Latin head through a very expensive scope. All I have to do is nod.”

She raised her right hand an inch.

A red dot appeared on my chest. It slid up my tie and out of sight.

I did not move. I am not sure I could have.

“Go ahead,” I said, and my voice sounded steadier than I felt. “Nod. I’m sure he won’t miss. But before you do, you should know that I’m not quite as idiotic as you think. If I don’t turn up alive in twenty-four hours, everything in this envelope goes to every newspaper and every news desk in the country, from CNN to the BBC.” I unrolled the envelope and held it out. “Read it first. Then decide what to do with my head.”

She took the pages and tilted them toward the streetlight. She read every one. Case names. Dates. Payments. Her own middle name, spelled out in the files of the man she had trusted to protect her.

Not a flicker crossed her face.

“What do you want?”

“What do you think I want? A paid weekend at Disney World?” I took the pages back. “I want a cut. And don’t try to cheat me, Eli. I know exactly what you’re paid.”

“How much of a cut?”

“Fifty percent of whatever the firm pays you per case.”

I knew fifty percent was out of the question. So did she. But every settlement begins with a number nobody believes, and the ritual has to be observed.

She almost smiled. “Twenty. And as you may have noticed, I’m not wearing my lawyer’s hat tonight, so take it or leave it.”

“Twenty-five, and we have a deal.”

“Fine. From now on, anything that comes from your firm is twenty-five percent yours.”

“One more thing.” I held her gaze. “If anything happens to me, anything at all, a strange car accident, a fall into the Charles, a peaceful death in my sleep, this gets published.”

“So now I’m your bodyguard? I’m supposed to make sure you look both ways before you cross the street?”

“I always look both ways, Eli.”

“Is that all?”

“No. I want to meet tomorrow to work out the logistics of our new arrangement. Deposition room A1 at the courthouse. Six in the morning.”

“Fine.”

She turned and walked away with her usual measured step. I moved quickly out of the light and looked down at my chest.

The red dot was gone.

My bluff had worked. For now.

But I knew better than to trust her. There would be no meeting at six. Elizabeth Grant did not negotiate with men who threatened her. She buried them. If I let her reach a telephone and a quiet room tonight, I would never see the sunrise.

I circled the block on foot, climbed into Roxy’s Cadillac, and pulled out in time to see the black Lincoln slide away from the curb. I followed a block behind, lights low, close enough to keep her taillights in sight and far enough, I hoped, to stay invisible. Through her rear window, I could see the glow of a car phone pressed to her ear.

Making arrangements, no doubt. For me.

She drove into the Back Bay and stopped across from a brownstone on a quiet, tree-lined street. I parked at the end of the block, grabbed the tennis bag, and ran.

She was already at the top of the stairs. The door swung open. The door began to close.

I jammed my foot into the gap.

Before she could turn, I had one arm around her neck and her right arm pinned behind her back. I kicked the bag across the threshold and shoved us both inside. The door clicked shut behind us.

She kicked. She screamed. No one answered. The house was empty.

“Stop fighting,” I said, close to her ear. “I only want to ask you a few questions.”

“Goddamn it, you scared me half to death, you son of a bitch!”

I steered her into the kitchen and pushed her down onto a heavy wrought-iron chair. Still holding her with one arm, I pulled a length of rope from the bag. I tied her wrists behind the backrest and each ankle to a leg of the chair.

“Now listen to me, Ms. Hamint, and listen carefully.” I crouched in front of her. “Who do you really work for?”

She spat in my face.

“Go to hell.”

I wiped my cheek with the back of my glove.

“Since you’ve chosen not to cooperate,” I said, “I’ll ask the court’s permission to treat you as a hostile witness.” I reached into the bag and unwrapped the towel. “And I have something here that may help refresh your recollection, counselor.”

It looked harmless, almost like a child’s toy pistol. Roxy had confiscated it from her boyfriend after an argument she had never fully explained. A stun gun. Fifty thousand volts.

I pressed the switch. A thin blue arc snapped between the two metal probes with a sound like an angry insect.

Eli’s eyes went wide.

“You’re not going to use that on me. People have died from those things. Heart attacks—”

“I won’t need to, if you behave.” I moved it closer. “Who do you work for?”

She stared at the blue spark and said nothing.

I did not have time for this. In a few hours, someone at the firm would call a locksmith to open Ross’s door, and my life as I knew it would end. Before that happened, I needed everything she knew.

I pressed the probes against her stomach.

One second. No more.

Her body arched against the ropes. When it released her, she doubled forward and vomited onto the kitchen floor. She was gasping, half-conscious, a thread of saliva swinging from her lip.

“Please,” she choked. “Stop. Stop.”

“Who?”

“Trust Mutual.” The words came out in bursts. “I answer to the CEO. Directly. Trust Mutual pays your firm, and your firm pays me.”

Trust Mutual. The client I had brought in. The account that had made me a partner.

“Can you prove it?”

“My computer.” She was crying now. “Under Trust Mutual. The password is Ross.”

Of course it was.

I left her tied to the chair and found the computer in a small study off the hall. The Trust Mutual folder was exactly where she had said, and inside it was enough to bankrupt the largest insurer in Boston, sink Lancy, Berger, and Williams, and end Elizabeth Grant’s career several times over. I printed all of it.

I was reaching to turn the machine off when I noticed a second folder, nested inside the first.

Its title was My Insurance Policy.

I opened it.

What I read over the next ten minutes changed the shape of everything. Eli had been building a file of her own, quietly and meticulously, for years. It named the man at the top: Michael Leonard Brown, chief executive of Trust Mutual, and the head of a criminal organization built on insider trading. The records tied him to at least two dozen companies through which he had illegally acquired shares in public corporations where he sat on the board or held some other position of influence. The file even gave the address of his headquarters in New York City.

And then there was the list.

It was titled simply On Payroll. Nearly one hundred names, each with a job title beside it. Patrol officers. Detectives. City inspectors. Clerks. Judges.

She had been telling the truth. She worked for people who recognized no boundaries at all.

The file told me the rest. For eight years, my firm had represented Brown’s smaller insurers, one after another, under names that never led back to him, and for eight years it had used Mickey. Trust Mutual was only the latest and the largest. I had not brought Brown to the firm at all. He had simply let me believe I had. Eli had played every part the work required: she had tainted evidence and fabricated it, appeared as opposing counsel in cases she had already arranged to lose, and carried bribes to officials on Brown’s behalf.

She was no pawn. She was one of Brown’s lieutenants.

And she had kept insurance against the man she served. In my profession, I knew all about insurance policies. I had spent ten years making sure they never paid.

I printed the hidden file and slid it into the manila envelope with the rest.

“Untie me,” Eli said when I came back into the kitchen. Her voice had recovered some of its iron.

“Not yet.”

I was still wearing my gloves. I took the heavy object from my coat pocket, unwrapped it behind her back, and pressed it into her bound hand.

“Hold this for a moment while I see to your feet.”

Her fingers closed around it. She could not turn her head far enough to see what it was.

I knelt and worked at the knots on her ankles, then shook my head.

“Too tight. I’ll find something to cut them.”

I stood behind her, took the object carefully by its edges, wrapped it again, and slid it into the tennis bag.

She never saw what she had been holding.

In time, she would wish she had.

I untied her wrists and left her there, working at the ropes around her ankles, while I let myself out the front door. I drove away the long way, through side streets, checking my mirror at every turn.

It was nearly midnight when I rang Rachel’s bell.

She opened the door in a silk robe, annoyed at being woken. Then she saw my face, and the annoyance became something else.

The FedEx would reach her in the morning and explain some of it. I could not wait until morning. I sat her down, put the envelope in her hands, and told her everything: the Morales file, Mickey, the cathedral, the database, the Hamilton Building, the brownstone.

She listened without interrupting, which was not like her.

“You have to broadcast this, Rachel,” I said when I had finished. “All of it. The evidence is right there. Your story is the only thing that will keep these people from killing me.”

She looked down at the pages, then back at me.

“And lead with the Morales case,” I said. “If you don’t, those twins will end up in an orphanage. Please. If it’s the last thing you ever do for me.”

“What do you mean, the last thing?”

I kissed her softly.

“I may have to disappear for a while.”

“Why?”

I sat down on the edge of her sofa and put my face in my hands.

“Rachel, I think I killed a man tonight.”

For a moment, she said nothing at all.

“What? Who?”

“It’s too complicated.” I stood. “I have to go. I need to pack, and first thing in the morning I have to close my accounts and get some cash. I’ll call you as soon as I’m on the road.”

“Xavier—”

“I know how it sounds. I know. But this is going to be the scandal of the year, and you have every source you need. You’ll be putting crooked men in prison and saving two orphans from poverty.” I took her hands. “And you’ll be saving my life. Promise me you’ll run it.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

“If the sources check out,” she said, “it’ll be on the air from here to Istanbul by noon.”

I kissed her once more and ran out the door.

I did not see what happened after it closed. I learned later.

Rachel stood alone in her living room with the pages in her hands, trembling, though not from fear.

“This is it,” she whispered. Then, louder: “This is my story.”

Within minutes, she had an editor at NBC News in New York on the phone. She told him she had the biggest story of the year. She told him she had dug it up herself.

Somewhere in that call, she must have mentioned that her source was a man who might be dead by morning.

If she did, no one remembered it.