Lisa Scottoline - Killer Smile

Thank you, God.

She felt tears of relief well up under her eyelids. Keisha had survived the operation and was in intensive care, but she hadn’t yet regained consciousness. The loss of blood had left her in a coma, and the surgeon wasn’t sure when, or even if, she would recover. They couldn’t determine the damage the oxygen loss had caused to her brain. A somber Bill had stayed at the hospital, saying he’d sleep in the waiting room, but he’d wanted Mary and Judy to leave, and they did, reluctantly.

Mary worried that Keisha wasn’t safe in the hospital. That when Chico found out he hadn’t killed her, he’d come back to finish the job. But Bill had promised to stay by her side, and Mary knew he would. He loved the girl. And he said he’d call Keisha’s mother, so she’d be flying in today. She’d be safe with all those people around her. Now all she had to do was live.

A wave of exhaustion washed over Mary, with the hot water. She shampooed her hair, feeling the sudsy foam slick on her shoulders, but she was too bummed to shave her legs. At least it was a good excuse. She got out of the shower, toweled off, and slipped into her McNabb jersey, then tucked herself into bed. She couldn’t stop thinking about Keisha and wishing that she’d remembered her before she rushed into Saracone’s bedroom that night. She lay sleepless in the dark and didn’t even consider reaching for the remote.

Mary took a right turn, then a left, and ended up in the same place she had started, having gone around in a circle for the third time. On a bright Tuesday morning, after a lousy night’s sleep, she’d hit the road early to find Saracone’s office in the suburbs, right off the Schuylkill Expressway.

LEHIGH VALLEY INDUSTRIAL PARK read the red-and-yellow letters on the sign, but once she was in the industrial park, everything looked the same. Clusters of four-story brick buildings were laid out like a corporate honeycomb, and lush lawn curved around the buildings, bordered by overmulched beds of tulips planted in bands of red and yellow, evidently the team colors. Some evil genius had embedded the red-and-yellow signs for the various companies among the tulips, destroying forever any chance a South Philly girl had of finding Saracone Investments. But if Mary had crashed a funeral, an industrial park should be a piece of cake.

She gripped the steering wheel and took another turn. Only a few cars were parked in the pocket lots at this hour, and she didn’t see anyone she could ask for directions. She turned left, found another tulip bed, and searched for the sign. Dearborn Computers. Mary was losing her sense of humor. The attempt on Keisha’s life had raised the stakes, and she had fought all last night to suppress the horrific image of the woman slumped bleeding against the alley wall. She had called the hospital from the car, and the intensive care nurse had told her that Keisha hadn’t awakened and Bill was asleep in the waiting room. She cruised to the next cluster and the next tulip bed. Household Plastics, Inc.

A white Cadillac drove past, and Mary followed him to the next chamber of the hive, where they both parked, side by side. The man, in casual dress, got out of the car carrying a bronze Halliburton, his cell phone bud plugged into his ear. Mary frowned. This ear-bud thing had all started with the Sony Walkman, and she didn’t like it one bit. She flagged him down, raising her voice to be heard. “Excuse me, do you know where Saracone Investments is?”

“No idea,” the man answered without breaking stride or further conversation, and Mary growled under her breath and backed out of the space. She drove around reading tulips and with only three missed turns, asked five more people where Saracone Investments was. None of them had any idea. It was getting weird. After another wrong turn, she found a gardener in a yellow jumpsuit with a red Lehigh Valley patch and she jumped out of the car and accosted him.

“On the end,” he said, pointing, and she went back to the car and drove to where he pointed. Then she understood why she hadn’t seen it before. The last brown building had a tiny tulip bed in front and the smallest sign of all, with an array of company names in smaller fonts: Rate Foods, Inc, The Steingard Foundation, Francanucci Insurance, Ltd., Juditha Corporation, Simmons Partners, and Saracone Investments. The pocket lot was empty even though the others had been filling up. Why? She’d see for herself; she had found Saracone’s office. Mary felt a tingle of fear but chased it away.

She got out of the car, her jacket suddenly sticking to her back. She had dressed in her favorite nondescript beige suit, had her hair pulled back, and was wearing her glasses, so Justin wouldn’t recognize her from the newspaper photo. It was an abundance of caution, because she doubted that he’d be back at work so soon after his father’s death, but maybe she could sweet-talk the receptionist and get into his office. She walked up the elegant flagstone walk, past the evil tulips, and reached a brown door, hoping it wasn’t locked. She pulled on the door, and it opened into a hallway with a panel of mailboxes. Each one was labeled: Rate Foods, Inc, The Steingard Foundation, Francanucci Insurance, Ltd., Juditha Corporation, Simmons Partners, and Saracone Investments.

No! A mail drop? She had driven all the way out here to find a mail drop! She went to the Saracone Investments box, which was stainless steel like the others, and locked, with a little clear window in the top. No mail showed in the window, so it must have been empty, saving both the decision of whether to break in and Mary’s immortal soul. But she couldn’t be stopped now. A dry hole!

She hit the mailbox in frustration. She couldn’t believe an empty mailbox was all there was to Saracone Investments. Where did Justin go to work, and Giovanni before him? Did they work at all? She had seen something like this only once before in her life. At Grun amp; Chase, her old law firm, she had met a client whose father had made money in the stock market in the early 1950s. The children and grandchildren spent their lives investing and reinvesting the money he’d earned in the fund but were never employed in real jobs. Was that what she was seeing with the Saracones, and Justin? Where had they earned all that money? She couldn’t just give up and go back to the office. She had forgotten how to be a lawyer. And just when she started to like it, too.

Ten minutes later, Mary had successfully located the management office of the industrial park and was standing before a reception desk with a cardboard box she’d had in her trunk. She placed it on the reception desk next to a nameplate that read TONI BRUNETTI and waited for the receptionist to get off the phone. It didn’t look like it was going to happen anytime soon. Toni, a young woman with spiky black hair and a fake-diamond stud pierced through her left nostril, had flashed Mary the one-minute sign five minutes ago.

“And then I find out, just this morning when I get his email, that he was seeing her and her friend and all the chicks from the chat room. All of them. Even hillbillygirl !”

Mary averted her eyes but there was nothing to see. A plain office with white walls, furnished with a tweedy sofa and chairs, a whitish laminated coffee table, topped off with a dreaded vase of company tulips.

“How could he do that? Hillbillygirl? Who knows what you could catch from a hillbillygirl ?” Toni tore a Kleenex from a gaily patterned cube on her desk and dabbed at her nose with it. Mary wondered what the deal was with that nose pierce. Did it get in the way of heartbreak?

“I knew he was fooling around. He started working out and he got his eyes lasered and his teeth whitened. Since when did he ever care about his eyes or his teeth? Until February, the only thing he cared about was basketball!”