Bombshell by Catherine Coulter
“That’s what she said about you, Davis, or something close to that.”
Davis called out, “Hey, Marvin, is that Ariel playing?”
Agent Dane Carver shouted from behind them, off to their left, “Under the black Toyota!” Both Sherlock and Davis dove to the ground and rolled, pointed their guns toward a row of parked cars on the street, Marvin right beside them, trying to pull Sherlock under him with one big hand, and aim his gun in the other. Even though Marvin was a civilian, it didn’t occur to her to tell him to get away, not Marvin. There was a single shot, then a long burst of gunfire from all of them, and a yell. There was silence for a bare second before Savich called out, “You shot him, Dane. Sherlock, you and Davis okay? Marvin?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Regular snow angels. Marvin? He’s a lovely, very big snow angel. Hey, Marvin, get off me, I can’t breathe.”
There were two more shots from the night, unexpected, and then Coop shouted, “Another one down, over here.” They waited, then searched the street. There was no one else.
Savich looked down at the two tattooed young men in turn, both painfully young, both moaning and clutching their wounds. One of them was close to the sketch of the man Griffin and Delsey saw in the alley in Maestro, the same man who’d tried to use the extension ladder to break into his house last night, if he had to guess.
Savich prayed they’d survive and one of them would talk. He heard sirens approaching as he leaned down and searched one of the young men’s pockets. No wallet, no ID, nothing, and so he couldn’t believe it when his fingers closed over a cell phone. He pulled out a small flashlight and looked at it, Sherlock, Davis, Marvin leaning over his shoulder. It was a throwaway, but it was a start.
Marvin was pumped. He slipped his gun back into his pocket and announced, “That all happened in a drunk second, didn’t it? It’s really fine to see these morons whupped right outside my club. Stupid is as stupid does, right, Sherlock? Sorry I nearly squashed you.”
She grinned up at him. “Hey, thanks for protecting me.”
Marvin patted her cheek and walked back into the club to deal with all the excited voices he heard coming from inside. He closed the door behind him. He was bombarded with questions, but simply raised his hands and said, calm as a judge, “It’s all over, folks. The FBI are outside, and they’ve asked everybody to stay inside here for a minute. Everyone can have a beer on the house while we’re waiting.”
There was a cheer, and he quickly nodded to Ariel. She looked a bit on the pale side, true, but she was game, he thought, proud of the tiny Croatian woman who hardly spoke a word of English but played like an angel. She put her flute to her mouth, and her achingly beautiful melody was instant balm. The buzz still circling the room quieted, and the patrons slowly returned to their seats and their free beers—not the imported beer, though, the cheap beer on tap. Ms. Lilly’s people knew her well enough for that. They didn’t want to get punched in the nose.
Sherlock heard Ariel begin her flute solo again outside the club. As usual, Marvin impressed her. He was ready for anything they could dish up. Sherlock wondered where Ms. Lilly was. Surely she’d heard the gunfire. “Uh-oh,” she said. “Speak of the devil, here comes Ms. Lilly.”
“A force of nature, that woman,” Davis said as they watched the owner of the Bonhomie Club come steaming out, a man’s coat pulled over her white satin dress and her five-inch stiletto heels, her magnificent bosom leading the way. She wasn’t happy.
She threw back her head and yelled over the sirens, “Dillon! Where are you, boy? You brain-dead or something, bringing trouble here, to my club? And now our local law enforcement is going to come here and try to roust me? Thank you so much! Come over here, I’m gonna kick your fine butt!”
Sherlock heard Dillon laugh, then shout, “I’ll be there in a second, Ms. Lilly; we got us two perps here who wanted to hurt Sherlock. We got it taken care of. Everything’s over. We had agents all over the place, and nothing happened inside.”
“I’m going to thump Marvin’s head, not telling me what was going to happen.”
“I’m surprised it did happen, actually,” Savich called back. “We’ll have these bozos out of here in a minute.” He looked back at her again.
Of course there were always worries, but why say that to Ms. Lilly, particularly after half a dozen cop cars arrived and there were endless explanations and reassurances that the FBI had things under control. Savich assigned an agent to each wounded man and watched the EMTs load them into the ambulances with the cops looking on. He turned to see Sherlock touching his coat sleeve. “What was on that phone you found in the kid’s pocket?”
“A phone number. The area code includes Maestro. Let me calm Ms. Lilly while you check this out. Then we’ll call Ruth.”
He wondered how he was going to soothe Ms. Lilly’s feathers, and not just figuratively, he noticed, since she was wearing two peacock feathers stuck in her big chignon, her signature ’do. She stood waiting for him.
Savich didn’t have a chance to call Ruth. His cell sang out Billy Ocean’s “When the Going Gets Tough.” It was Melissa Ivy. He smiled at Ms. Lilly. “My sincere apologies, Ms. Lilly. I’ve got to take this call, but to make it up to you, I’ll play one night for free.”
She tapped a stiletto heel in the snow. “Only one night? What do you think I am, pretty boy? As easy as those baby bangers you took down here?”
“All right, two nights, for free.”
She smiled at him and patted his cheek, pulled the coat around her, and tottered back through the snow and into the club, headed back to her game of Texas Hold ’Em with people who should know better than to sit across a table from her with money.
“Savich here, Ms. Ivy. What’s happening?”
“Agent Savich, I was listening on my computer to one of my music CDs I like that Peter had put together for me just a few days ago—you know, to help me feel better. I normally play it on my CD player, but this time I played it on my computer, and I noticed the last file on it was a video of some kind. When I played it, I saw it was Mr. Hart in his study, talking on the phone. I think it’s the video from that surveillance disk you were looking for.”
He would have rubbed his hands together after hearing that, but his cell rang again, almost immediately. It was Dane Carver calling from the emergency room at Washington Memorial. The Latino Dane had shot in the shoulder who’d been lying with his eyes closed, moaning on a gurney in an ER cubicle, had suddenly reared up, grabbed a scalpel from a tray near his gurney, and sliced his own throat before Dane could even register what he’d done. “My fault, Savich, my fault. It happened too fast—and the blood, I didn’t realize how much blood there was in a single human body, and it fountained out all over everything, including me.”
“Tie the other one down, Dane.”
“Already done. Ollie will keep on him, you can count on that, and if anyone can get him to talk, it’s Ollie.”
Savich said, “Ollie’s good, but you’re better, Dane. Go get yourself cleaned up and deal with this, all right? You get anything out of him, you got a week’s vacation in the Virgin Islands.”
Savich heard an attempt at a laugh. Good, maybe the thought of sun and sand with his wife, Nick, would get Dane focused again.
Washington, D.C.
Tuesday night
It was close to midnight when Savich and Sherlock drove to Melissa Ivy’s apartment through the steady veil of snow. There was only the occasional car on the road, so it took only eleven minutes. They’d both been tired from the adrenaline rush from the Bonhomie Club, but no longer. It was Sherlock who knocked on Melissa’s door.
The door whipped open, and Melissa’s face was manic with excitement. She was wearing cat pajamas and big fuzzy slippers, and she was waving a disk at them. “I found it! I found it!”
In a moment, she’d slipped the disk into her computer and they were looking at h
And there it was, a video file from the surveillance system at the Harts’ house.
They watched Wakefield Hart seated at his desk in his study on his cell phone. Both his voice and the picture were sharp and clear. “Yes, Raj.”
Raj? It became clear soon enough that Raj had come from a board meeting at an investment firm—Bowerman and Hayes—and he was telling Wakefield how they were putting together a buyout offer for Lancer Inc., a large supplier of transponders to the military with a forty percent premium over the market value of the stock. The buyout would be announced publicly in two weeks. Hart ended the conversation assuring Raj he would get his usual share of the after-tax profits.
They watched Hart punch off his cell, slip it in his pants pocket, and leave his study, smiling and humming.
“What does it mean?” Melissa said. “I know it has to be illegal, but what does it mean?”
“It means,” Sherlock said, “that Mr. Wakefield Hart was profiting from insider trading and his insider at Bowerman and Hayes was this Raj.” At Melissa’s blank look, she added, “When one company buys out another publicly traded company, they need to make it attractive enough to all the company’s shareholders, and so they offer a higher price per share in the marketplace, to make enough of them happy. I’m sure we’ll find trading logs at Mr. Hart’s broker showing he bought up a whole lot of shares on Lancer Inc. before the buyout was announced. He probably made millions off this one trade. It sounds like he and this Raj have pulled this off before.”
Savich said, “It also means with trading logs, phone records, and especially this video, that Mr. Wakefield Hart would be prosecuted by the Justice Department and spend the next twenty years of his life in prison. I’m betting he was willing to do just about anything to avoid that.”
Savich’s cell belted out “Wild Thing.”
“Savich here.”
“Agent Hiller here, Savich. Sorry to call you this late, but I thought you’d want to know we’ve got a screaming match going on at the Hart house.”
“We’ll be there as soon as we can. Are the daughters there?”
“No, they left earlier with a woman, Mrs. Hart’s sister, I believe. There’s only Mr. and Mrs. Hart in there, flailing at each other.”
Hart home
Tunney Wells, Virginia
They met Agent Hiller by a huge oak tree in the front yard of the Hart home, snow falling lazily around them. “They’ve quieted a bit, but she was screaming at him that he killed his own son, yelled some nasty names, and slammed out of the living room. She went back in a minute ago.”
Savich nodded. “Thanks. Keep an eye on things out here, all right? If there’s any trouble, call in backup and come in after us.”
Savich pressed on the doorbell.
There was no “Who’s there?”—only Hart, heaving and red-faced, jerking open the door and staring at them. “What the hell are you doing here? It’s one o’clock in the frigging morning!”
“We want you to tell us about Raj, Mr. Hart,” Sherlock said pleasantly, and she stepped forward. He took a step back into the large entry hall automatically, his face for an instant confused, then frozen with shock.
“That’s right, Mr. Hart,” Savich said, stepping forward and sending him pedaling back. He held up the disk. “We saw this video of you speaking on your cell to your buddy Raj about the Bowerman and Hayes buyout of Lancer Inc. Turns out Peter left a copy with his girlfriend, Melissa Ivy.”
Hart was shaking his head now. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I want both of you to leave.” But he didn’t move, as if he couldn’t, only stood there, his hands fisted at his sides, struggling with the panic showing on his face.
“Peter must have told you he wasn’t going to let you kill him like you did Tommy, didn’t he? Told you he’d secreted the disk someplace safe? Didn’t you believe him?”
Mrs. Hart stood in the doorway to the living room. Even from this distance her eyes looked glassy from drugs. She must have taken more when she’d stomped out of the living room a little while before. She crossed her arms over her chest and smirked. “Insider trading? White-collar crime is your specialty, isn’t it, Wake? But murder? What’s on the disk that’s so damning you had to murder Tommy? What, he was blackmailing you?”
“Shut up, Carolyn, shut up! You don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t murder Tommy, I didn’t murder anyone. I don’t know anything about that damned disk, I don’t—” Fear bloomed wild in his eyes. Savich grabbed Hart’s arm to keep him from bolting. “Let’s all go into the living room, Mr. Hart. You can tell us all about it.”
Carolyn Hart yelled at her husband, “It’s over, you bastard!”
“I agree, Mrs. Hart,” Sherlock said, and took her arm and led her in the glass-walled living room, with Mrs. Hart craning her head about to look at her husband. It was silent in the room except for Mrs. Hart’s heavy breathing and the crackling of a fire that burned brightly in the fireplace.
Sherlock released Mrs. Hart’s arm. “So you have information your husband killed Tommy Cronin? You know Tommy was blackmailing him because he and Peter had that video on the disk?”
She stared at Sherlock. “I heard him screaming one night that Stony had fixed the damned surveillance system, and he was banging his fists against the wall in his study he was so furious. I asked him why that was a problem, but he wouldn’t tell me. Then he ran into the control room behind and tore out the system, tore it out with his bare hands, and he never stopped cursing. He frightened the girls.”
Savich said, “You had no idea, did you, Mr. Hart? Stony liked to fix things, decided to fix the surveillance system and didn’t tell anyone. Maybe he thought it was funny to spy on his family with his friends when they were bored. I’d have to say he was surprised when he saw his father committing a major felony. Tommy, Peter, Stony, all of them must have been having a fine time until they saw you on this video.
“They all knew banking and finance, knew exactly what you’d done. Stony probably made Tommy and Peter swear they’d never say anything, but Peter was Peter, wasn’t he, Mr. Hart? A greedy manipulator. I don’t doubt it was Tommy who called you, demanding money. Peter would have put him up to it.”
“This is all nonsense, all of it.”
“Shut up, Wake! That is exactly what happened, isn’t it?” She looked like she would have run at him, but Sherlock again held her in place.
Savich continued, “Tommy was flush with cash in December, as was Peter. They got that cash from you, after Tommy sent you a copy of the disk. I’ll bet he promised he’d give you the original and you’d never hear from him again.
“But Peter wouldn’t let this gold mine go, and you did hear from Tommy again, so you met him at your office on M Street, which just so happens to be on the third floor of the Hampton Building, and you threw him out your window.”
Hart listened, saying nothing, fists at his sides, shaking his head back and forth.
“Quite an idea to leave his body at the Lincoln Memorial, to send us off in the wrong direction, at least for a while. But you overthought what you did next. You thought you understood your son Stony’s anonymizer software, you thought no one on earth could ever trace anything sent using it, but the thing is, Mr. Hart, you didn’t understand as well as your son did, and we traced the photo you uploaded of Tommy Cronin’s body back to Stony’s computer.
“And that brought Tommy Cronin’s murder right back to you.”
Carolyn Hart was panting now, nearly hysterical with rage.
Hart kept himself in tight control. “Shut up, Carolyn. You have no idea what you’re talking about. They have no proof of anything at all.”
Savich shook his head at him. “No proof, Mr. Hart? We found a lot of cash in Peter’s apartment. Your cash, Mr. Hart, because he didn’t withdraw it from his own bank account. He didn’t have that kind of money. Neither did Tommy. But you made a large withdrawal from your brokerage account in early December, deposited in your bank account. Then you made three large cash withdrawals, two in December, and one yesterday, Monday. What happened, Mr. Hart? Peter called you, didn’t he? He told you he had copies of the disk, too. Knowing Peter, he would have tried to persuade you it wouldn’t do to try to kill him, as you killed Tommy, that he had copies hidden away.”
Hart walked to the middle of his modern living room surrounded by falling snow and pulled out his speaker’s voice, smooth and deep. “I want you out of my house. I’m going to call my lawyer.”
“Feel free,” Sherlock said. “But before he arrives, you might as well know our lab will be looking for trace evidence in all of your cars. If you used any of them to haul Tommy’s body to the Lincoln Memorial, they’ll find it. We’re going to track your whereabouts, and Tommy’s, on Friday night, and we’ll be searching your office and the concrete sidewalk under your office windows. A human body that falls onto concrete from that height leaves traces. Your phone records, and Tommy’s and Peter’s—there will be calls you have no good explanation for. You cannot hope to get away with killing them, Mr. Hart.”
“But I didn’t kill Peter, I tell you. I didn’t kill that little bastard!”
Sherlock said, “Then why, Mr. Hart, was your gun lying beside Peter’s body?”