Christopher Smith - Fifth Avenue

She didn’t know why he mentioned this and she certainly wasn’t about to ask-Leana had other things on her mind. She looked up at the elevator’s lighted dial and said, “We’re almost there, Louis.”

But Louis ignored her dismissive tone. “I think Anne would have enjoyed tonight,” he said. “She always liked parties. She was the perfect hostess-beautiful, smart, witty, sophisticated. Anne could make friends as easily as I seem to make enemies.” He smiled at the memory of her. “If she were alive today, you can bet your ass that the Baron and Baroness would have invited us to one of their dinner parties. They would have fallen in love with her just as I did. Everyone liked her.”

Leana knew that she should respond to this, but she didn’t want to encourage him. The man who murdered her sister was in her office. It was this she wanted to focus on, not Louis Ryan’s wife. Willing the elevator to move faster, she said, “She sounds wonderful, Louis. You must miss her very much.”

“Oh, I do,” Louis said. “We were perfect together, Leana. You can’t imagine how much I miss her.”

He looked away and she saw something in his expression change, as if a switch had been shut off, a curtain dropped. “I suppose that’s why your father murdered her.”

He leaned forward and pressed the button that stopped the elevator. Beyond the windows, the city froze.

Fear crept into Leana’s heart.

“She died thirty-one years ago,” Louis said, his finger still on the button. “Victim of a freak car accident.” He cocked an eyebrow at her. “At least that’s what the police said. But I know differently. I’ve always known differently. Your father murdered my wife. Have I ever told you what happened, Leana?”

She didn’t answer him. She checked the dial and saw that they were between the twentieth and twenty-first floors.

“I see that I haven’t. But I do think you should know what your father did. I think it’s time that you and the whole world knew exactly what happened.”

Leana’s heart was beating in her throat. She remembered how strangely he acted on the dance floor, how preoccupied he had been with her father and she had a sudden premonition of danger.

“The weather was terrible that night,” Louis said. “Anne and I had an argument and she left the house in the middle of a blizzard. I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t listen to me. Instead, she got into her car and left. I couldn’t go after her. We had only one car back then and I remember how worried I was for her. Anne never drove in the snow. Hours passed and nothing, not a word. So I started calling around to friends, family-but nobody had seen her. Nobody knew where she was.”

He seemed to slip further into the past, sinking straight into a time and a place in which she sensed he wasn’t comfortable. He closed his eyes. “And then the police called,” he said. “They told me that Anne’s car went off the road and over the bridge that was down the road from our house.”

He removed his finger from the glowing button and the elevator lurched into motion. Leana watched him pull his hand away. All of this was a set-up. She’d played right into it. She looked at the elevator doors and wondered what would be beyond them when they opened.

“It was awful,” Louis said. “Leaving the house, running through the snow to the bridge, seeing her car like that in the river, knowing there was no way she could have survived that fall, knowing that my Anne was dead.” Anger shot into his voice. “Do you know what that did to me? Do you know how long I’ve waited for this moment?”

What moment?

Leana pressed her back against the elevator doors. Somewhere, far in the dark corners of her mind, she knew where this was leading, knew what he was saying, but she refused to believe it, because it couldn’t be true.

Louis closed the distance between them, the rage suddenly there on his face, heated and alive. It was as dark as her fear, as black as her dress and it filled the elevator to capacity. In a low voice, he said, “Even before I learned her tires were flattened by a shotgun, I knew this was no accident. Your father and I had been battling in court for years. When I won that final appeal, he got his revenge two days later by killing one of the few people who ever mattered to me.” His eyes became hard stones of hate. “And now I’m taking everything away from him.”

She shrank away from him, her eyes growing wide with disbelief. She felt her knees start to give as realization washed over her. Her world began to blur as all of the pieces of the past several weeks clicked into place. “You!” she gasped.

Louis reached out and grabbed her by the arm. “That’s right,” he said. “Me.”

The elevator stopped.

The shiny chrome doors slid open, revealing a long, elegantly appointed corridor that stretched before them in varying degrees of light and darkness.

Leana’s office was at the end of the hall. Louis pushed her so hard through the doors that she hit the wall opposite the elevator. A table was there. She reached out to grasp it in an effort to stop the momentum, but she missed. She fell on the table and went down with it.

“Get up.”

But the table wasn’t bare. On it was a lamp, which now was at her side. Leana clutched it and turned to throw it at him, but Louis was there. He grabbed the lamp as she swung it at his face and flung it across the room, where it smashed on the floor.

“You’ll need to be quicker than that,” he said. “Get up.”

She did what she was told. He took her by the arm and they started walking toward her office, their footsteps echoing like drum taps on the polished marble floor.

Leana was numb. Louis Ryan’s words beat in her head. He killed her sister. It was him all along. “You won’t get away with this,” she said. “Everyone knows I’m here.”

“That’s right,” Louis said. “Everyone knows you’re here. But what you’re forgetting is this, Leana. Everybody also knows what happened to your sister. The whole world knows that somebody is out to harm your family. If you’re found shot dead tonight, no one’s going to be surprised by it.” He thought of the two barmen that had been found in the lobby. “Security already has been breached.”

Leana looked furiously at him. “You planted those men at the bar.”

“Actually, I didn’t,” he said. “I don’t know who they are or why they were here. But I am glad they came. Their presence just made things a lot easier for me.”

They were nearing the end of the hall. Leana could faintly hear voices coming from her office. She turned and looked back down the length of the corridor, toward the elevator. She had to escape. She had to get help. But how? She could feel Louis looking at her.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “And I have to tell you that you’d be wasting your time. This entire floor has been sealed off. Every door is locked, every exit is barred. Your only way out is through that elevator and in a moment, Vincent Spocatti is going to take care of that. You run and I promise you’ll get shot in the back.”

They were at her office. He opened the door and said, “By the way-your husband’s last name isn’t Archer. That’s just a pen name he used to escape from me. His legal name is Michael Ryan.”

Leana looked at him in disgust. “Bullshit,” she said.

“Hardly.” He pushed the door open and they came face to face with her father and Michael.

Time and space drew in on themselves.

They were seated across the room in matching red velvet chairs. The city blazed behind them. Pale as ghosts, they looked up at her when she walked inside. Seeing them here, realizing just how carefully Louis Ryan had orchestrated this, Leana could no longer still the panic rising up in her. He’s going to kill us.