David Rosenfelt - New Tricks

“The CEO of Timco Laboratories, Timmerman’s company. He owned twenty percent of the company.”

“So Diana Timmerman was having an affair with her husband’s business partner?”

I nod. “And he told me he barely knew her to say hello.”

“Lying about a love triangle is not exactly an earth-shattering event,” Laurie says.

“But it potentially takes on an added significance when two-thirds of the triangle are murdered by a hit man. It sort of gives new meaning to the word ‘isosceles.’ ”

“According to Marcus, Childs didn’t say that he killed Walter Timmerman,” Kevin points out.

I nod. “That’s true, but probably only because it was another question I didn’t tell Marcus to ask.”

“So in a normal world,” Laurie says, “this would all be starting to make sense. Sykes, who no doubt has a lot of money, hires Childs to kill Timmerman, so as to clear a path for Sykes and Diana. Then Diana starts to pressure him, cause him problems, and he decides to get rid of her as well.”

“And then, because he hired the hit man as part of a ‘kill two, get one free’ promotion, he sends Childs out to kill Waggy.”

“I said ‘in a normal world,’ ” Laurie points out.

“Still, it does make Sykes a person of interest,” Kevin says.

“Certainly interesting to me,” I say. “Let’s give him a call.”

I place a call to Sykes’s office and am told he is in a meeting. I leave word that it is urgent, and he calls me back in half an hour.

“Mr. Sykes, I’ve been doing some investigating, and I’ve got a few more questions for you. If we could meet sometime tomorrow, then-”

He interrupts. “I’m afraid I’m very busy, Mr. Carpenter. I can’t keep taking the time to-”

I return the interruption. “I understand, but I’ll make it as convenient for you as possible. I can come to your office, or if you’d rather we can meet at the Hamilton Hotel.”

There is silence on the other end for at least twenty seconds while the message is digested. “Mr. Sykes?”

“I see you’re not above dragging people through the mud.”

“Actually, I’m not dragging anyone through the mud. I’m trying to clear the mud away so I can see through to the bottom.”

He agrees to see me, as I knew he would, but I’ve got a feeling we’re never really going to be buddies again.

Once I get off the phone, I ask Kevin to go down to the jail and ask Steven if he is aware of any particular rival that Walter Timmerman had on the dog show circuit. It still seems like a ridiculous long shot, but I believe in covering every base.

Then I call Cindy Spodek at her FBI office in Boston. Once again I’m told that she’s in a meeting, but when I say it’s important, the meeting mysteriously ends and she gets on the phone.

“What’s up, Andy?”

“You weren’t in a meeting, were you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“They said you were in a meeting, but then you got on the phone. I think it was a fake meeting.”

“It’s a fake meeting that’s about to start again, if you don’t get to the point,” she says.

“I want to talk to the agent heading up the task force on Walter Timmerman.”

“You mean the task force you don’t even know about because I never told you?”

“That’s the very one.”

“Forget it, Andy.”

“I know who killed the Timmermans, and I thought I should share it with the government, my government, as a way to demonstrate my patriotism.”

“I’m getting all misty.”

“I would think that a task force investigating Walter Timmerman might want to find out who killed him. That might even be one of their primary tasks.” I’m overstating things a bit here, but I’m comfortable with the assumption that if Childs admitted killing Diana Timmerman, then he must have killed Walter as well.

“Was it your client?”

“No.”

“Is your client still in jail?” she asks.

“That’s another story,” I say. “Can you set up a meeting?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she says.

“Your country will be forever grateful to you.”

I ASSIGN SAM WILLIS THE JOB of giving Thomas Sykes a cyber strip search.

Maybe it will turn out that all Sykes was doing was getting into his partner’s wife’s pants, but I want to know what else he was getting into before the Timmermans died.

Laurie has cooked dinner tonight, the first time she’s done so since she was shot. She’s doing remarkably well; though her walk is unsteady, her facial features and speech are both almost back to normal. She still tires easily, which drives her crazy. I know that, because she tells me so.

I have my own, admittedly unscientific, way of measuring how Laurie is progressing. Basically, my theory is that the more I think about sex, the healthier she must be.

For a few weeks after the shooting, sex was the farthest thing from my mind. All I cared about, all I obsessed over, was Laurie surviving and then someday regaining her health and strength.

Then, as it became clear she was out of the woods and on the way to a full recovery, the idea of sex as an eventual possibility appeared on the horizon. But it was certainly nothing imminent, and I just as certainly didn’t consider doing anything about it.

But now I detect some faint rumblings out there. It’s still not anything I would act on; my fears of rejection and humiliation would simultaneously rule that out. But I am definitely at the point where if Laurie suggested it, it would not provoke a raging argument. It might even be good for her psychologically, and I’m certainly a guy who would do anything to help.

After dinner Laurie makes coffee in two devices she uses, which involve pushing down on the tops and sort of squeezing the coffee out. I think they’re called French presses and she considers this the only way to drink coffee. Unfortunately, my taste buds aren’t quite sensitive enough to know the difference. I can happily drink any kind of coffee, even instant, while Laurie would rather drink instant cyanide.

“Andy, was there ever a time when you thought I was going to die?”

My knee-jerk instinct is to say no, but for some reason I decide to try the truth, just to see how it goes. “I thought you had died,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

I tell her about receiving the phone call in Hatchet’s office from Pete, and my desperate fear that he wasn’t telling me the full truth, that he was just getting me down to the hospital so he could convey the devastating news in person.

“That must have been awful for you,” she says.

“I can’t ever remember a worse time in my life. But once I got there, and you came out of surgery, then I knew you were going to make it.”

“What made you so sure?”

“It was like, once I could put my mind to it, then I could control it. I thought you had died before I had a chance to focus on your recovery, but once I had that chance, I knew we’d make it.”

“We’d make it?”

“I only wanted to live if you did.”

“Please don’t say that,” she says.

I nod. “Okay. I won’t say it.”

Laurie is quiet for a few moments, then says, “We’ve never talked about dying, about one of us being left behind.”

“We don’t talk about a lot of things,” I say. “It’s natural; we’re both busy, and we’re usually in different time zones.”

She smiles. “We talk about our days; I tell you how my day went, and you tell me about yours.”

“I have to come up with more interesting stories. Or more interesting days,” I say.

“I love my job, Andy. And I love Findlay. And I love you.”