Lynne Heitman - The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

“What about Gary?” We needed to stay on point.

“Drazen likes to buy gambling debts. He looks for anyone he considers to be useful to him, like lawyers and accountants and cops. People on the inside of successful companies. Gary had a big debt we couldn’t pay. Drazen bought it and then told us he would kill him if I didn’t do what he said.”

“What did he ask you to do?”

She tried again to make eye contact with Harvey. He didn’t seem to be able to look at her, but he also hadn’t pulled his hand out of the knot of interlocking fingers and thumbs where she had tied herself to him. “Identify targets of opportunity for him. He had a lot of money coming into the country, and he needed legitimate places to wash it. He wanted it where no one would look for it.”

“You did this with other companies?”

“I had no choice.”

It made sense. As an auditor for midsize firms, she would have been in the perfect position to know who was vulnerable to a Drazen pillaging. “You figured out how badly Roger needed cash and brought the Russians in. Is that right?”

“Roger begged me to bring them in. He was all upset about the company going down, his father’s business and the family legacy and all that crap. At least, that was what he said at the time. He knew I had…connections. He asked me to hook him up. I told him he was better off with the deal he had, but he wouldn’t listen, and he wouldn’t leave me alone, so I did what he asked. I introduced him to Drazen’s people. Drazen came in and recapitalized him.”

“What did Drazen get in exchange?”

“He got to use the company for various things.”

“Such as?”

“What you’d expect. Laundering money. Shipping stuff around the world using Betelco as cover.”

“How much did Roger know?”

“Turns out good old Roger knew exactly what he was getting into. Not too long after they came in, he started giving me the cold shoulder. I didn’t see him much anymore. If you want to know the truth, I think he used me to get them in there, because once they were in with all their dirty cash, he started stealing it.”

“Stealing Drazen’s cash sounds like a risky strategy.”

“It put me in a very bad position, because if Drazen found out, he would have blamed me.”

“Let’s see, you screwed your lover, Roger, over by bringing in your Russian investors, then got worried that Roger was about to screw you back?”

“Exactly. I got the feeling he was about to take his dough and disappear and leave me holding the bag. I couldn’t let that happen. Drazen would have thought I was in it with him from the start. I had to know what he was up to, so I went through the books and…the books, if you know what I mean. I figured out where he was hiding the money. That night that it all came down, Roger and I were supposed to meet at the offices to talk about it.” She glanced again at Harvey and pitched her voice to him and him only. “That’s why I was there. I didn’t have any choice, baby. They would have killed Gary.”

The implications of doing what she had done to protect the man for whom she’d left Harvey, while she was sleeping with another man, seemed to elude her. “Anyway, he never came, but Vladi did. That’s the night it all went down.”

“That’s the night Vladi died?”

“Yes.”

“Keep going.”

“Vladi was like Drazen’s puppy dog. He followed him around and did errands for him. From what I heard, he was his bodyguard back wherever they came from. Vladi took a bullet for him more than once. Anyway, I was there at the offices working late that night when Vladi showed up. I was by myself, and all of a sudden, this big, hairy, smelly piece of crap whacked out on coke and God knows what else walks in, sees me, and starts drooling. I knew I was in trouble. He’d been up for days drinking and snorting and gambling and whoring. He thought I was just part of the package, a cute young thing sitting right there for the picking. I tried to talk to him, but those people-Russians, Ukrainians, whatever-to them, a woman is for screwing or beating or maybe both at the same time. He was on me before I had time to scream. He bent me backward over Roger’s desk and put his tongue down my throat.”

Harvey was listening closely. The healthy coloring in his face had been temporary. He was as pale as ever.

“There were so many different ways I thought I would die that night.” Rachel’s voice had softened. She was sounding as exposed as she must have felt lying across that desk. Harvey patted her on the arm. “I was scared out of my mind, so while he was groping me, I started looking for his gun. I knew he’d be carrying. He was so far gone when I found it, he didn’t notice. I shot him.”

“What kind of gun?” I asked her.

Her eyes flashed. “What difference does that make?”

“Do you know how to disengage the safety on an automatic? Can you do it while you’re bent over a desk being raped?”

“You do a lot of things you didn’t think you could when you’re about to die. I found the gun, and I stood him up, and I shot him.” Her voice had turned brittle, but it wasn’t strong. Even though she was angry, there was still something vulnerable about her, and I couldn’t tell whether it was harder to feel for her or not to feel for her.

“How many times?”

“Three.”

“Was he dead?”

“Oh, yes.”

I turned to Harvey. “This is where you came in.”

“Very well.” He shifted his weight, cleared his throat, and began. “It happened four years ago in March. I remember, because it had been a long winter already, and it was still so very cold. It was evening. I was on my way to see a client, a man who owned a chain of dry cleaners. I was doing his taxes.”

This might have been one level of detail more than I needed, but too much was better than too little. I let him carry on.

“My coat was on, and my hand was on the knob of the door when the phone rang. It was a rule. Once I had my coat on, I would never answer the phone. For some reason, that day I waited, and when the machine picked up, I heard Rachel’s voice.” He gave her a shy, sideways glance. “She was crying.”

“You broke your rule.”

“Yes, thank God. She said she was in trouble and needed my help.”

I wanted to ask if he’d bothered to ask what kind of trouble, but there was no point. Nothing could have drawn Harvey in more than having a chance to be of service, especially to Rachel. “What happened then?”

“I went to the address she gave me. It was an office building in Cambridge. Roger Fratello’s office. She was on the fourth floor. The elevator was out of order, and I had difficulty climbing the stairs. The more I tried to hurry, the harder it became.”

I pictured him trying to make those stairs, crawling on his hands and knees if he had to, to get to her.

“When I got there, she was sitting in a chair, shaking like a frightened animal. Vladislav Tishchenko was dead on the floor. She told me she had killed him. There was blood.” He closed his eyes. “There was much blood.”

“Keep going.”

“It was a nightmare. The entire scene was a nightmare. We rolled the body in…in large plastic bags Rachel found in a janitor’s closet and carried it down the stairs. We put it into the trunk of the dead man’s car. There was money in the trunk, packs of currency and lots of it. I had to move it to fit the body in. I put it in a bag Rachel found that was in the front seat.”

“Was this the money that ended up in Brussels?”

“I assume it was.”

“Then this explains how your prints got on it. You handled it to put it in the bag.” I looked at Rachel. “Did you ever touch it?”

“Harvey handed it to me in a bag. I never touched it.”