Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

In the lobby of City Hall she found a guard, a black man of around fifty. “I need some help,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“A man is dead,” she said.

Before he could even get a word out, she continued, “In the Government Center parking garage.” She gestured behind her.

“Let me radio for an officer,” he said.

She waited for the response, crackling over his radio. She didn’t fully understand it, but it sounded like cops were coming.

About ten minutes later, a weary young cop arrived, presumably a beat cop. A handsome but haggard-looking guy with blue eyes and black hair.

She told him she’d just found a body.

The cop walked with her across the plaza and into the Center Plaza building. In the moonlight, the cool evening, everything had the smeary feeling of a dream sequence.

“He attacked me,” she said. “Did I already tell you that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the cop said. His radio was crackling on his hip.

The leftmost elevator’s doors were closed. She pressed the button, and it bing ed and its doors came open.

The elevator was empty.

Empty.

No blood. No body.

Empty.

She stared in disbelief.

“He was — there,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.” She noticed a real change in his expression. Almost an eye roll. “Looks like he left.”

“He was dead! I’m quite sure of it.”

“Uh-huh.”

She was certain it was the leftmost elevator, but what if — being so panicked, so near-hysterical — she was remembering wrong? She tried the other elevator, punching the button. It opened, empty.

“Can I ask — have you been drinking, ma’am?” the cop said.

“No!”

“Or are you on any substances, maybe?”

“That’s impossible!” she said. “He was here. If he was moved—”

“Okay, ma’am.”

What the hell was going on? She didn’t understand it: Greaves was dead. Why was his body gone? Could somebody have moved it? There was no way he’d gotten up and walked away.

There must have been a backup team or something that had come and retrieved Greaves, cleaned up the scene. What else could it have been?

“The man was dead,” she said. “This is where he attacked me, in this elevator. I killed him in self-defense. This is the crime scene.”

“Okay,” the policeman said. “If you want to file a police report—”

“No, he was right here,” she said. “Someone moved his body.”

“Okay then,” the cop said. “I’m at the end of my shift, so let’s keep things simple. If you want to file a police report, I’ll be glad to pass you on to one of my colleagues.”

Something clenched and unclenched in her gut. Because she finally understood. She understood the logic of the loose end. Greaves had failed.

That had turned him into a loose end.

The elevator doors closed, and Juliana steadied herself against a pillar. She shook her head. She was finally beginning to think clearly. She had no time to waste. She had to get out of there. She flashed on the prospect of spending hours to no avail in a police station, filing reports and answering questions.

“I’m— I’m sorry to waste your time,” she said. Her eyes were out of focus. She saw a trash receptacle and stepped over to it, and her head jerked down and she threw up. Hot acids scalded her throat. It was as if her body were determined to purge itself of some poison. She thought it would bring a sense of relief.

It didn’t.

She drove home cautiously, uncertain of her driving abilities after so long without sleeping. When she got home, she found the house dark. It was a little after three in the morning. Duncan was asleep upstairs.

But it was too late to go to bed, even though she desperately needed sleep. Instead, she made coffee and sat tensely in the kitchen checking her e-mail and working on exactly how she was going to play the next ten hours. There were just too many unknowns.

Her head kept throbbing.

A couple of hours passed. At five, she decided to wake Duncan, but first she made a fresh pot of coffee. She took her time and fixed it the way he liked it, with half-and-half and Splenda, just the right shade of tan, and brought the mug upstairs. He needed his sleep, but she really needed him to strategize with. Duncan was smart as hell and inevitably thought of an angle she’d forgotten.

She would tell him about what had happened in the elevator, but later.

She nudged him, and he slowly opened his eyes. “It’s time,” she said.

“I know. Oh, thanks.” He took the mug gratefully and took a sip. “Fantastic.”

“Will he see you?” she said.

She was talking about Arnold Coren, a professor of Russian history at Columbia who had been Duncan’s old mentor when he taught at Harvard.

“Arnie? Of course.”

“At his office in Morningside Heights?”

“He’s taking me to lunch at the Metropolitan Club,” he said. That was a private social club located in a magnificent Stanford White — designed mansion on East Sixtieth Street.

“Drinks first?”

“Many. Whiskey. You know what he’s like when he’s had a few.”

“I do.” She laughed grimly.

The doorbell rang, startling her. She looked at her watch. It was five thirty. Yes: the FinCEN guy. Half an hour late.

She went to answer the door, just as Duncan was coming down the stairs.

The man standing on the porch was a tall, stern-looking, black-haired man, wearing a blue windbreaker. He had a heavy brow and looked to be in his late thirties.

“Judge Brody, I’m Alex Venkovsky, from Treasury.”

“Right. Come on in.”

She saw a large black government-looking vehicle, a Cadillac Escalade, parked in the driveway behind Duncan’s car.

“So much for punctuality,” Juliana said, glancing at her iPhone.

“Sorry. We spent the last two hours sterilizing the whole neighborhood. Making sure nobody had eyes on the ground.”

“Okay. So what’s the schedule?”

“Well, ma’am, our plane is leaving earlier than anticipated, so we’re going to need to get on the road. Like now. Uh, are we going like this?”

She smiled, glancing down at her sweats and bare feet. “Right, hope you don’t mind if I change,” she said, opening the door and backing up to let him enter.

“We don’t have a lot of time. Mr. McNamer’s plane leaves at nine on the dot.”

“McNamer, huh? We’re talking Giles McNamer?”

“Yes, ma’am. He’s a friend of the Treasury Secretary’s, and he happens to be going to Nantucket this morning and is very kindly letting us hitch a ride. But he’s apparently trying to make a ten A.M. tee time. So he wants us there no later than nine at his FBO at Logan.”

Giles McNamer was the co-founder of a huge private equity firm and had been a special adviser on economic policy to President Obama. You couldn’t find anyone more Establishment. He sat on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; he graduated from the Dalton School in Manhattan, and Harvard, and Harvard Business School; was a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group; and he went to Davos every year.

“We’re flying on his private jet?”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s a Gulfstream G650.” He said it like that meant something.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“Oh, no, ma’am, I’m good. I can’t have coffee when I fly. It gives me a nervous stomach.”

“How are we getting downtown? You’re driving?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’ll be back down in a couple of minutes.” She went upstairs and changed into the burgundy Armani suit she’d found at Nordstrom Rack, her go-to outfit, the one that always drew raves. It gave her confidence. She needed it. She put on makeup. Because of her exhaustion, everything looked pasty on her. Her lipstick looked too strong against her tired, whitish face.