Jennifer Greene - Secretive Stranger

Cord sighed. “So did a lot of women.”

Bullets kept shooting through his mind. Funeral arrangements had to be made. Someone had to deal with his brother’s business, from bills to belongings. Their father was hooked up to oxygen full-time, wouldn’t be able to handle anything-just telling him would be a crisis in itself-and thank God they’d lost their mother, because she’d have crumpled to find out what Jon had become and how he’d died.

“Who did this? Do you know?” Cord asked again.

“That’s exactly what we need your help with.”

Cord wanted to throw something. Too many people could have wanted to strangle his brother. Himself included.

He paced around the desk, stared at the black diamonds sluicing down the windows, the pitch-black night, the bleakness of it. “Look. I can’t seem to grasp any of this. You think this woman, this Campbell person, killed him? Is that why you mentioned her?”

They all pulled back for a moment. Neither man had moved from their rock-quiet position in front of him. The detective, Bassett, started to say, “At this time, this soon, there’s no possibility of our knowing anything definitively-”

But Ferrell interrupted him, looked directly into Cord’s eyes. “Your brother has been under private investigation for the last two months. I believe he’s been blackmailing two women, and possibly more. He had a pattern of targeting high-profile women, where a public scandal would have crippled their lives. My client is a senator, but believe me, she isn’t the only one who wants this matter handled as privately as possible.”

“We absolutely want to find out who murdered your brother,” Bassett clipped in.

“But we also want access to the blackmail evidence your brother had. It’s no one’s goal to impede the investigation. Everyone concerned wants the killer brought to light. But in an ideal world, the innocent victims wouldn’t be exposed to a media circus.”

“Holy hell.” Cord rubbed the back of his neck again.

“We have no absolute evidence of blackmail-” the detective interjected, but Ferrell interrupted him again, his voice quiet and sure.

“No one expected your brother’s death. No one knew for sure how far your brother’s…activities…had gone, or how many women were involved. But right now it’s a tangled mess. A lot of people could be hurt if this is handled the wrong way.”

Cord wished his thermos wasn’t empty. His throat was dryer than the Sahara. They kept heaping on more bad news. “Maybe we’d better get a few things straight before you say any more,” he told both men. “I did a stint in the Air Force, donated some years to the State Department-easy enough for you to check my background, and I’m guessing you already have. But being a patriot doesn’t mean I have any use for politics and politicians. I don’t. I don’t spy and I don’t lie. So if that’s what you’re asking me-”

“It’s not, Mr. Pruitt. But we are asking for your discretion, and your help. We absolutely want to bring whoever did this to justice. But we believe that it’s in everyone’s best interests to keep this under the media radar as much as possible-”

Bassett was long-winded and careful. Ferrell cut to the chase. “It’s too soon to draw conclusions. We all know that. But as an initial strategy, it makes good sense to publicize your brother’s death as an accidental fall. Temporarily, not forever. There’s no question, at least in my mind, that this was a murder-”

“Although we won’t know that until the results of an autopsy. We know very few specifics this soon.”

Ferrell rolled his eyes. “It was murder,” he repeated to Cord. “But the reason we want the media calling it accidental is to gain an advantage. The murderer wouldn’t be on her guard.”

“We don’t positively know that it’s a ‘her,’” the detective piped up again, but Ferrell ignored him.

“If the murderer feels safe, she could slip, make mistakes. The women involved with your brother are going to want that blackmail evidence, Mr. Pruitt. There are pictures, notes, CDs. We know that, but we don’t know where they are. We believe the murderer-as well as the other women involved in your brother’s life-will likely take some major risks to find that evidence. To destroy it.”

The detective took his turn. “Your brother’s next-door neighbor,” he said, “is twenty-eight…”

“That’s the Sophie Campbell you mentioned?” Cord asked.

“Yes. She works as a translator for Open World. She’s been with that organization since she graduated from college. She does extensive translating projects for them, often on-site. For the last nine months or so, she’s been living in Foggy Bottom, gathering stories from women survivors in World War II. She speaks Russian, German, Danish.”

Cord’s head was swimming. “I don’t understand why you keep bringing up this woman-unless you either believe she was one of the women Jon was blackmailing, or that she’s the killer.”

“We don’t know either of those things,” Ferrell said. “But we do believe she’s the key to your brother’s killer in some way.”

“Why?”

“We’re not really at liberty to say,” the detective said cautiously, but again, the private cop proved more frank.

“We’re uncertain to what extent this young woman is involved. What we do know, however, is that she was the only consistent person in your brother’s life. She was in and out of your brother’s place quite frequently. In fact, she’s the only one who had a key, as far as we know.” The older man hunched closer. “We need your help, Mr. Pruitt. We need your help to solve this…and we need your discretion.”

Cord frowned. “I still don’t know what you’re asking me to do. If you need my permission to go through Jon’s place, fine, you’ve got it. I assume you’d have that legal right, regardless, in a crime situation-”

“It’s not that simple. What we also need is you, specifically because you’re his brother, a family member. Once we’ve officially-so to speak-labeled this an accidental death, we need you to go in, act like a grieving brother, look like you’re closing up Jon’s affairs.”

“That’s hardly going to be an act,” Cord said. “It’s what I have to do. There is no one else.”

“Exactly. The thing is, wherever your brother hid his stockpile of information, he hid it well. It’s not as if we haven’t been trying to track down evidence long before this happened. And although we don’t know precisely what role Sophie Campbell plays in this, we do know she had more access to his place, to him, than anyone else. We haven’t been able to dig up any incriminating background on her, but we all believe she knows more than she’s saying. Someone who wasn’t connected to the law might have a significantly better chance to get her talking.”

Cord grabbed his jacket and folio of student papers and notes. Enough was enough. He’d had more than he could take. “If you’re asking me to spy, as I said before-forget it.”

“We’re asking you to talk to her. Which should naturally happen if you’re in your brother’s apartment-she’s right there. If she happens to tell you information that you judge as valuable, we’re asking you to communicate-preferably to me, first.” This, from the detective.

But it was Ferrell who was looking at him. Ferrell who wanted anything he dug up. First.

Cord motioned them all to the door. This party was over. He wished he could hurl something. Even though he was two years younger than Jon, he couldn’t remember a time he wasn’t cleaning up Jon’s messes…but this was by far the most disturbing and ugliest.

As far as this Sophie character, though, Cord already had her pictured, because he knew the kind of woman his brother went for.