62
DARRYL LOOMIS was driving in a loose circle through the congested streets of Midtown, Leah Roth in the Town Car’s backseat. It was early evening, the rush-hour traffic so dense pedestrians were moving faster than cars.
“So,” Leah said. “We’ve finally gotten things under control.”
Darryl glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Not so sure,” he replied.
“We’ve got the reporter boxed in; we’ve got the Nazario case out of Riley’s hands. What’s the problem?”
“I don’t think we’ve really gotten either of them off our backs.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because she was over at his apartment the other night,” Darryl said. He had laughed out loud upon hearing about the reporter’s trying to lose her tail by sneaking out of her office and then dodging around Macy’s before making her way to the lawyer’s apartment. She’d succeeded in getting away from her physical tail, but it hadn’t mattered. His men following Candace were mostly just meant to intimidate her.
After stealing Candace’s purse, Darryl had downloaded a surveillance program onto her BlackBerry, then made sure it’d gotten back into her hands. Not only could he read her e-mails, but the device now worked as a GPS, allowing Darryl to pinpoint its whereabouts anytime it was on. Since the reporter carried it with her at virtually all times she was outside her apartment, Darryl could know her location even without any actual surveillance on her.
Leah felt personally jealous as well as professionally betrayed, her jaw clenching tight. “How long was she there?” she asked.
Darryl glanced back at her. It was clearly not a question he’d been expecting. “Maybe an hour.”
“I just offered him a job at the company,” Leah said. She tried to keep her expression composed, not wanting Darryl to glimpse the depth of betrayal she felt. “He was mad about being taken off the Fowler murder. I thought it would be a way to calm him down.”
“How much does he know?” Darryl asked.
“He knows some, and I’m sure he suspects a good deal more,” Leah said. “He’s a long way from the full story,” she added quickly, impulsively protecting Duncan.
“You’re sure about that?”
Leah nodded briskly. “Besides, he’s too much of a lawyer to have given the reporter anything that would directly hurt us.”
“Maybe.”
“His being too much of a lawyer is the whole problem. That’s why he won’t let the case go. Anything else on the reporter?”
“I’ve gone through her computer. She’s trying to make a connection between Fowler and the Aurora, but it doesn’t look like she has all the pieces. Mostly, though, she seems to be digging into Riis and the politicians. Could she take down Markowitz?”
“I doubt she can even try. Dad has an understanding with Friedman as part of dropping the libel suit, so Snow shouldn’t have any room to operate at the paper.”
“Let’s say the reporter and Riley are pooling everything they know. They could piece most everything together, couldn’t they?”
“Even if they could, it’d just be speculation, and what’re they going to do with it? The Journal’s not going to print it without direct evidence. Riley isn’t even Nazario’s lawyer anymore. They can’t hurt us.”
“I’m not sure we’re that protected,” Darryl said, turning back onto the block where Leah’s office was located.
“I’ll deal with Duncan Riley and the paper. Everything went okay with Pellettieri?”
“He’s off the map.”
“I’m not going to ask for any details,” Leah said as she opened the car door. “I don’t want to know.”
AS SHE made her way back to her office Leah wondered for the hundredth time how things had managed to come to this. When exactly had the line been crossed? It’d started with her insistence on knowing what Darryl was going to do about Fowler. That’d led to their next conversation, when she’d become an active participant in planning a man’s death.
After Darryl’s reluctance to say much during their initial conversation as he drove her to work, Leah had insisted on their talking again the following evening. That’d been the same day that Duncan had taken her to lunch at Blue Fin, she recalled now. Darryl had parked the Town Car in front of her office around six o’clock, Leah going out and sitting in the back while he drove through Midtown.
Darryl clearly still hadn’t wanted to tell her anything about what he was going to do. “I’m already in the middle of this, regardless of whether I want to be,” Leah had said. “My biggest concern is how we eliminate the risk of someone connecting anything that might happen to Fowler to my brother.”
“Like I said before, there are ways to contain the scope of a police investigation.”
“By giving them someone to arrest?” Leah asked. “Is that what you mean?”
Darryl raised his eyebrows slightly, though his eyes stayed on the road. Leah had the sense she’d just impressed him. “That’s a possibility, yes. Doesn’t really matter what answers they come up with if they’re asking the wrong questions.”
“Because I had an idea with that,” Leah said, speaking quickly, fully aware that she was an amateur giving advice to a pro. “A lawyer at our outside firm has a client who’s being evicted from Riis because Fowler caught him smoking pot. A teenager. I was thinking, with the law firm, we could have some control over it. Make sure things didn’t end up pointing in our direction.” Leah couldn’t read Darryl; she trailed off, unsure whether she was making a fool of herself.
Finally Darryl spoke. “That could work,” he said. “We wouldn’t want the lawyers in the loop, though. Too risky.”
“The lawyers wouldn’t even know,” Leah said. “That’s the beauty of it.”
It’d been improvised, essentially, bringing in Duncan’s client as the fall guy. Leah hadn’t figured Duncan would find out. If he somehow did, she’d assumed his loyalties, like most people’s, would be decided by pragmatic considerations. Choosing to be on the side of her family was an easy call, or at least Leah had expected it to be.
It’d been stupid to get involved with Duncan romantically in the midst of it. She’d seen it as a way to guarantee his loyalty; but instead it’d just put him on guard. Not that her own motives in seducing him had been limited to the strategic. She’d found him intriguing, especially as she waited to see when or if he would tell her the thing about himself that she already knew.
Darryl had run a background check on Duncan shortly after the murder, part of his due diligence. He’d presented Leah with a brief summary of what he’d found, including the unforeseen detail that Duncan’s father was black. Once they’d started seeing each other she’d been waiting for Duncan to tell her himself, had been surprised when he hadn’t. It hadn’t mattered to her—if anything it’d made him more interesting. Leah had always felt slightly imprisoned by being born into a powerful family: she was attracted to those who were self-invented, and Duncan was his own invention more than just about anyone else she’d ever met.
Leah knew not everyone would feel the way she did about Duncan’s background. Her father wouldn’t approve of her getting involved with someone who wasn’t white, as such, though he’d be smart enough not to say anything. She wondered if Duncan hadn’t told her because he’d been worried she would have such feelings herself.
Leah remembered what she’d said to Duncan about playing her life like a chess game. Never had that been truer than the last couple of months. She’d seen a way she could use Duncan, and she’d done so, despite her interest in him.
But Duncan had made his own choices too. When the time had come for him to pick a side, he’d gone against her. His loyalty to a poor teenager from the projects apparently trumped his personal ambition. Duncan would have nobody but himself to blame for what was about to happen to him.