THE WEB UNTANGLES

Noon.

On the NBC set, the lights were up, the teleprompter was loaded, and three cameras stood ready for Rachel Tullier’s second report.

In less than three hours, the story had outgrown Boston. Every major network in the country had picked it up, along with the BBC and the Associated Press, and every one of them was using Rachel’s name for it. The Web of Corruption. Her face was on screens from Boston to Bangkok.

She finally had what she had wanted all her life.

The network’s opening graphics swept across the monitors, all brass and color, and the title appeared beneath her: BREAKING NEWS: THE WEB OF CORRUPTION SCANDAL CONTINUES.

No one on the crew noticed the heavyset man standing in the shadows behind the curtain to Rachel’s right. He had been waved through the studio’s rear entrance half an hour earlier by a security guard whose name appeared, with a modest monthly figure beside it, on a list Rachel had broadcast that morning.

The man raised a small silver pistol fitted with a long silencer. He leveled it at Rachel’s temple.

The red light on the center camera came on.

“Good afternoon,” Rachel said. “New details have emerged this morning in what—”

Two muffled shots.

The cameras kept rolling.

Rachel slumped forward against the news desk. Two dark wounds had opened just above her right ear.

For a long moment, no one in the studio moved.

Then came a third shot.

The curtain swayed open, and a large body toppled out onto the studio floor. It was Michael Leonard Brown. The barrel of the silver pistol was still lodged in his mouth. Beneath the back of his head, a dark pool was spreading across the polished floor.

The broadcast went on for eleven more seconds before someone in the control room thought to cut the feed.

It was long enough.

By nightfall, the footage had been played, paused, and played again on every network in the world. A murder and a suicide, live, on national television. NBC’s ratings went through the roof. The Web of Corruption was no longer merely the story of the year.

It was the story of the decade.

At almost the same moment the footage first aired, Richard Lancy was climbing the steps of a chartered Learjet at Hanscom Field, twenty miles northwest of Boston. He had a flight plan filed for Panama City and a suitcase full of bearer bonds.

The jet reached the end of the taxiway. It never reached the runway. Three state police cruisers and two unmarked federal sedans had pulled across it.

Lancy was led down the steps in handcuffs, still holding an unlit Cuban cigar.

Some men pay for their crimes. Others merely postpone the bill.

Greg Epstein had postponed his.

At that hour, he was stretched out on a lounge chair on a private terrace overlooking Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro, watching the same footage on a small television, with a glass of something cold in his hand.

For weeks, he had been quietly moving Brown’s fortune offshore, exactly as instructed. Brown had given him three months. He had needed less than one. What Brown had not known, and would now never know, was where the money had finally come to rest. Billions of dollars had passed through a maze of shell companies and numbered accounts and emerged, one transfer at a time, in accounts that bore Epstein’s name alone.

And now Brown was dead.

The mediocre in-house lawyer who had once fetched files for Michael Brown was now a very rich man in a country where, for someone with his kind of money, extradition was a word, not a threat. Courts could be persuaded. Judges could be rewarded.

Epstein raised his glass to the television.

Back in Boston, the offices of Lancy, Berger, and Williams were in chaos. Phones rang unanswered. Associates huddled in doorways. Partners were not answering their pagers. And in all the confusion, no one could find Norman Ross.

His office door was locked. His keys, it seemed, were wherever he was. And the only other key to that door, the master key that had lived for years beneath a box of Cuban cigars in Richard Lancy’s desk, had vanished.

By midafternoon, someone finally called maintenance to force the lock.

They found Ross curled beneath his own desk.

Within minutes, the floor was swarming with Boston police and homicide detectives. Outside, news vans had already gathered at the curb. A body at the very law firm at the center of the Web of Corruption. It was almost too good to be true.

It did not take the detectives long to find the murder weapon. It lay on the carpet near the body: a heavy brass ornament in the shape of the scales of justice, its base stained dark.

Across the hall, Roxana stood among the other stunned employees, her arms folded tightly across her chest.

No one noticed how pale she was.

Early that morning, alone in her own car, she had opened the black tennis bag and the envelope inside it. She had read my instructions twice. Then, long before the maintenance crew or the police arrived, she had let herself into Ross’s office with Lancy’s skeleton key, unwrapped the brass scales without touching them, and set them down on the floor beside him. She had locked the door behind her.

That night, she would drop the key off the end of a pier into Boston Harbor.

The police had their weapon. They also had a perfect set of fingerprints, and when the department’s computer ran them, it returned a match within the hour, complete with a photograph and a home address.

Detective Paul Maurice studied the file in disbelief. The prints belonged to an assistant district attorney. And she had a motive that any jury would understand. Ross had been her go-between. Ross knew everything.

The warrant was signed before five.

At dusk, a Boston SWAT team rammed open the front door of a brownstone in the Back Bay.

Elizabeth Grant was lying just inside it.

Two packed suitcases stood beside her, as though she had been on her way out. She had not made it. There was a single bullet hole between her eyes. Whoever had done it had been a professional.

Maurice could think of only one candidate.

That morning, on a side street not far from Car-Rent, police had found a red Corvette with its side caved in like a crushed can, its driver dead behind the wheel in a ski mask. There had been a gun in his hand. It would later be matched to the bullet that killed Elizabeth Grant.

Maurice would have very much liked to ask the man some questions.

But the dead do not answer questions, and no witness to the crash had come forward. And there was no sign of the other car.

One thing bothered him more than the missing car. He kept going back to the brass scales.

The prints on them were perfect. Four fingers and a thumb, as clean as a booking card. In nineteen years on the job, Maurice had never lifted a perfect set from a weapon that had been swung in anger. Hands sweat. Hands slip. And nobody, he thought, picks up a pair of scales to kill a man and holds them like a teacup.

He wrote that in the margin of the file. Then his lieutenant closed the case, and the country moved on to the next thing.

Paul Maurice did not.