Ridley Pearson - The Body of David Hayes

“Sure thing.” The secretary picked up on Liz’s jumpy nerves and interrupted her departure. “What’s going on, Mrs. Boldt?”

She avoided giving an answer, understanding then how practiced Lou had to have become to endure bad news without the slightest indication, how he must have learned to quash his own emotions, to keep himself out of it, and this went a long way to explain him to her. It struck her as odd that she was still learning things about him, that it had taken hardship to open her eyes.

She crossed the room to Tommy Ling’s cubicle. She’d had a lot of dealings with Tommy over the past year because his bailiwick was computer/security integration. Tommy’s Chinese American heritage put him a third-generation American, with not a twinge of Asian accent. He wore a sumptuous dark green wool suit and a shiny black tie against a gunpowder gray shirt with an English spread collar. He looked to be in his early twenties, but she knew from his employment records that he was pushing forty.

“Tommy,” she said, “you can set it up to have the system alert you when Tony enters the building, can’t you?”

“If you say to.”

“I’m saying to.” She wrote down her office extension and cell phone number, to save him having to look them up. “The moment he enters. Okay?”

“Is there anything wrong?”

She considered how to answer. “I have some really good news for him, for the whole department, and I want him to be the first to hear.”

The answer clearly satisfied, even pleased, Ling.

She returned to the executive floor before trying to reach Lou. By now her heart was working a little harder than normal, her chest warm, her face flushed. She peeled off the gray suit jacket hoping to cool off, the phone pinched at her shoulder.

“It’s Tony,” she told her husband, without introductions. “He’d be right at the top of my list, in terms of people with access to the system.”

“What about him?” She heard concern in his voice; she knew she was speaking too quickly, but couldn’t control herself.

“He’s not in.”

“So?”

“You know what they call him on Two-five? The Rooster, because he’s up before everyone else. It’s nine-thirty, Lou!”

“Liz, I’m going to say something, and I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but when you get excited or nervous you beat around the bush, and you’re doing that now, and that’s getting me nervous and excited. So please just take a second to settle down and tell me what it is you want me to come away with from this call.”

The reprimand and Lou’s instinct toward professionalism had their desired effect. She felt her frustration sink and her thoughts clarify. She also felt a little ticked off at him for being so blunt, but knew she deserved it. “He’s not answering any of his phones. More puzzling, Beth isn’t picking up at home. Tony has already missed an important conference call and a meeting. That’s not like him.”

She knew to allow Lou time to think.

“An emergency with the twins?” Boldt suggested.

“I know,” Liz said. “That’s what I thought, too. But his cell phone and his pager? His secretary can’t find him. Tony LaRossa? He’s the most wired-in guy there is.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, what ?” she asked, feeling the heat return.

“I agree it’s significant. I can send a patrol unit out to their house. Make inquiries. But more than likely they’re just broken down in a tunnel or on a bridge-somewhere that interferes with reception. Hospitals require you to shut off phones and pagers, which brings us back to the twins. Or maybe it’s batteries. It happens. There’s usually a pretty simple explanation for things like this.”

Either he was trying to calm her or he believed this, she didn’t know which. She told him about having asked Tommy Ling to watch the system for Tony’s use of his access card.

“That’s good thinking,” Lou said. “You must be married to a cop.”

“You’ll send somebody?”

“I’m on it.” He paused and then said, “That’s what you wanted all along, wasn’t it, me to send a unit over there?”

Her breath caught. Busted , she thought. She said, “I’m getting Miles and Sarah, don’t forget.”

“Don’t change the subject on me. You just worked me.”

“Thanks for this.” She hung up before giving him a chance to vent.

At 9:55 A.M. her office phone sounded the intercom tone and she picked up.

Tommy Ling said frantically, “Main entrance!”

“Tony’s here?”

“He’s had a heart attack or something. You’d better get down there.”

There were times Liz marveled at the speed and ease of elevators, but this was not one of them. She arrived on the ground floor to a sea of security shirts bent over a pair of legs she assumed to be Tony’s, a throng of employees lined up trying to get in, and chaotic shouting of nearly everyone involved.

She pushed her way through the attendants, enough to first identify and then get a better look at Tony LaRossa. His face was a pale color she’d never seen before, his lips a faint blue. He was either unconscious or dead. He’d made it through one of the two metal detectors, and had collapsed. A black nylon webbed briefcase lay unzipped and opened on the security inspection table. It was common practice for security to search every bag. It appeared that Tony had collapsed in the middle of just such a search.

She established that an ambulance had been called, verified by the sudden distant whine of a siren that grew progressively louder. One of the attendants got Tony’s feet elevated as a woman began CPR on his chest. A male guard pinched off Tony’s nose and administered mouth-to-mouth, a handkerchief placed over Tony’s lips. A low, steady voice counted, “One-two-three-four… ” and Liz felt her chest swell and her eyes challenged by tears as this team of trained people tried to save him. Tony’s life seemed to be passing before her eyes, and she silently whispered prayers that Tony not be harmed. She removed all fear, all claims that the images before her could in any way harm him. She fought this her way, while they fought theirs, giving no thought to calling Lou or to anything outside the sphere of this immediate need.

The EMTs swarmed inside with their equipment and wheeled stretcher, and took over the CPR without missing a beat. It looked to Liz so rehearsed and choreographed, and she realized that there were people in this world who did nothing but save other people. Or try to. She marveled at how strange it must be to rise every morning and put on a gray-striped shirt and know you will see death and injury before the sun sets.

“What happened, Dilly?” she managed to ask the guard she knew only by his first name. She saw him twice a day, every day. Dilly was middle-forties and beer-bellied, with an easy disposition.

“Mr. LaRossa. Same as always: got the green light, stepped up to be checked, but tripped the mag going through.” He indicated the metal detector. “And, I don’t know, just something came over him, like. He pulls out his cell phone. No big deal, but something hammered him. He just stared at it, tried to pass it off, and keeled over. Dropped like a stone. Three of us here, not one of us got to him in time to catch him. Went down hard. Thunked his head pretty good.”

“That’s the cell phone?” she asked, stepping so easily into the role of inquisitor, understanding the rush that Lou felt doing this. A blue Nokia sat on the scratched vinyl-topped table that security used for searches. Liz stepped up to the open briefcase. Papers. Pens. Several small computer disks. A laptop. A Palm Pilot device. A second cell phone: a small Motorola flip.

Liz glanced back and forth between the two cell phones. Two , not one. Before she even placed the call to Lou, she knew this addition to be of significance to Tony’s heart attack. She knew it all had to do with David and his determination to get at this money. Tony LaRossa ? she thought in stunned disbelief.