Jasmine Cresswell - Suspect

Paul couldn’t spare time to waste mourning the mayor. “What’s the name of the annoying little Nazi who guarded access to Jason as if he was in charge of the gateway to heaven?”

“Fred Mitchell,” Sam said. “He is…correct that. He was the mayor’s chief of staff. Jesus! I can’t believe Jason’s dead. Son of a gun, he was right here, enjoying dinner, less than twelve hours ago. He was smart and honest, too. You don’t get many politicians like that. Especially not with approval ratings like Jason was getting. Dammit, his death is a real loss to the community.”

Not to mention a real loss to the Arran project. Sam needed to get his thinking focused on what was important here, namely that there was nobody left to get their project the zoning variance it needed and that Paul’s financial future was on the line. It was a hell of a nuisance that he had to rely on Sam, Paul reflected, but he really had no choice. The man had a knowledge of the inner workings of Denver city government that was second to none. Paul sure as hell hoped the guy would be able to put that knowledge to good use and pull a rabbit out of the hat. The financial consequences of an implosion of the Arran project were more than Paul could bear to contemplate.

“I’m going to fly out to Denver right now,” Paul said. Sam might know Denver politics, but when the going got really tough, Sam backed off. He would apply pressure, but only so much. Paul, on the other hand, had discovered that if bribes didn’t work, a touch of polite blackmail could usually turn the trick. Sam was one of those naive, old-fashioned types who scorned bribes and didn’t understand blackmail—although he knew exactly where all the bodies were buried.

“I can maybe catch the ten-thirty flight.” Paul was already walking toward his bedroom. “With the time difference, I could be in Denver before noon. I’ll go straight to your offices. We need to plan our strategy.”

“What are you smokin’, Paul? Nobody in the mayor’s office is going to be meeting with developers today. For Christ’s sake, Jason Hamilton’s dead! Show the man some respect, will you?”

“I’m sure he was the best mayor in the country. But showing him respect isn’t going to get the Arran zoning sewn up before Edgar Showalter can fuck us over. We need to get somebody on the zoning committee to sign off on the paperwork. Today, if possible. I’ll see you this afternoon, Sam.” Paul hung up the phone before DiVoli could object some more. Maybe the millions at stake didn’t matter all that much to Sam, but they sure as hell mattered to Paul.

He walked through the empty bedroom and into the shower. Julia was already dressed. He could hear her down in the kitchen, grinding beans for their thousand-fucking-dollar super-deluxe espresso machine. He wouldn’t tell his wife he was going to miss the Feldmanns’ dinner, Paul decided. He’d call once he landed in Denver. That would teach her to try to manipulate him into accepting invitations from people she knew he didn’t like.

Paul turned the water on full blast and calculated how much he and Sam DiVoli might have to shell out in bribes to get the rezoning sewn up. Right now he was so strapped for cash that it might even be difficult to come up with a bribe big enough to do the trick. Maybe they should bag the idea of bribery and move straight on to blackmail. If that was the route they took, Sam would be crucial to their success. If you were important enough to have a secret, and you lived in Denver, Sam knew your secret. He was a useful business partner to have, Paul reflected, provided he didn’t get sidetracked by an annoying attack of civic responsibility. Sometimes Sam DiVoli was just too damned honest to be reliable.

Paul couldn’t afford to let this become one of those occasions on which Sam was afflicted with a conscience. The entire financial future of Raven Enterprises was riding on the success or failure of the Arran project.

He’d already suffered the public humiliation of being identified as the business partner of a bigamist. He sure as hell wasn’t going to go bankrupt because that same damn bigamist wasn’t around to tell him where to invest his money. Whatever the business and financial communities might think, Paul Fairfax was every bit as smart an investor as Ron Raven had ever been. The Arran project would prove that to all the doubters and then Raven Enterprises could be renamed Fairfax Enterprises, which it should have been from the first.

Bottom line: the Arran project simply could not be allowed to fail. It was Paul’s ticket out of a deep financial hole and into a promising future.

Conifer, near Denver, the Evening of August 7

Liam drove slowly along the twists and turns of Coyote Lane, looking for 356, the house belonging to the Mallorys, Chloe’s sister and brother-in-law. The road was narrow and gravel-surfaced, in keeping with Conifer’s past as a frontier town, but the houses still managed to project an aura of yuppie success with front yards expensively landscaped to look untamed.

In keeping with the phony rural atmosphere, there were no sidewalks, no mailboxes and the house numbering seemed expressly designed to be invisible from the road. This last feature would have been infuriating except that it provided Liam with an excuse to brake often and scope out his surroundings, all the while creating the impression that he was simply searching for his destination.

Once he had the house located, Liam checked again for any cops in the vicinity. There were only three vehicles within sight and two of them seemed harmless: an empty Mercedes parked in a driveway and a landscaping truck at the far end of the cul-de-sac. Liam could hear members of the landscaping crew calling out to each other in Spanish as they loaded equipment onto the truck in preparation for leaving. The men were working too hard and much too efficiently to be undercover cops, Liam decided.

By contrast, the phone company van parked a couple of houses down from the Mallorys struck him as highly suspicious. In his experience, phone companies no longer made service calls after six, whatever type of emergency the customer pleaded. In addition, there was no activity around this particular vehicle. The man in the driver’s seat had been staring at the same clipboard of papers ever since Liam first noticed him. Eighty-twenty the guy was a cop, Liam decided. Thank goodness there was no reason for him or his car to provoke any special interest.

Taking care not to glance back toward the cop, he parked his BMW right in the driveway and jogged up the front steps. The Mallorys’ front door was opened by a man about Liam’s own age, holding a small boy in his arms. The boy’s nose was painted blue and he had green stars stuck on his cheeks, but otherwise he seemed a pretty regular kid bordering on the cute, in fact. Not that Liam considered himself an expert on toddler cuteness. His attitude toward kids was pretty similar to his attitude toward tiger cubs: they looked adorable, were incredibly difficult to raise and could bite off chunks of your flesh if you didn’t treat them right.

“You must be Liam,” the man said, shifting the toddler to a different arm so that he could shake Liam’s hand. “I’m Tom Mallory, Chloe’s brother-in-law.”

“Hey, Tom. Good to meet you.”

“And this is Peter, our son. Chloe’s nephew.” Tom jiggled his arms, bouncing Peter, who didn’t crack a smile.

Liam told himself it was ridiculous to feel intimidated by a toddler with a blue nose. “Hi, Peter, how are you doing?”

The toddler stared at him in silence. Not hostile, exactly, but definitely assessing. Liam decided that a tiger cub would have been easier. At least nobody would have expected him to hold a conversation with a tiger.