The Dangerous Edge of Things

CHAPTER 39

Eventually he fell asleep. It wasn’t good sleep—he tossed his head and mumbled nonsense into the pillow—but if he was asleep he wasn’t vomiting, and if he wasn’t vomiting, he was getting better. I curled into a ball on the sofa and eventually fell asleep too, somewhere around four.

His phone rang at seven. I answered it in a daze. “Yeah?”

“Who the hell is this?”

I scrubbed at my eyes. “It’s Tai, Marisa. How are you this fine morning?”

“I’m calling for Trey.”

“He’s sick.”

“He didn’t call in sick.”

“He’s really sick, like too sick to call in sick.”

If she was the least bit curious at my being there, she didn’t show it. “There’s a press conference this morning—ten o’clock at Beaumont Enterprises. Tell Trey to bring back the files on the meeting last night.”

“Listen to me—Trey is throwing-up-delirious sick. He’s not coming in.”

“Then you need to bring them. Wear something suitable for the camera, not that purple thing.”

I sat up and my head throbbed. “You’re not getting this, are you? He’s sick, and I’m not leaving him. Besides, Landon fired my ass yesterday, so forget you or him or anybody else at Phoenix bossing me around anymore.”

A long pause. “You have a point. Landon will be over to pick up the materials in an hour.”

“I’ll meet him in the lobby,” I said, then hung up.

I heard Trey stirring in the bed and went to see if he was awake, but he’d just turned to his other side, wrapped himself around a different pillow. I ran my hand over his forehead. Still cool, which was a relief.

I sat on the edge of the bed. “You need to wake up, Trey. They all think it’s over, but I know better, and you do too.”

He didn’t reply. Even though the night had been a cycle of garbled dream-talk and throwing up, every time I touched him, I felt this surge of tenderness, which completely unnerved me. It reminded me too much of taking care of Mom, the helplessness and the frustration. But he needed somebody, and there I was. Somebody.

So I got up and wet the washcloth one more time.

***

I figured I had about thirty minutes before Landon arrived, so I got to work looking for the files. Trey’s briefcase was an uncharacteristic mess, as was his deck, so I rummaged through the drawers and found a stack of empty folders. And then I sat on the floor and started putting things back where they belonged. Or seemed too. I figured Trey would rearrange everything the right way once he woke up.

Going through his desk—this time with no ulterior motive—was fascinating. He’d managed to get his gun put away—that drawer was locked up tight, as usual. The tarot deck was still in the desk drawer, as were the usual prescription meds and emergency folders, plus the GQ magazine. Only now I noticed that it was over two years old, and that it featured a black Armani suit on the front cover.

So that was where he got his fashion sense.

I put it back in the drawer—interesting, but not pertinent. What I needed to do was get a handle on Trey’s notes before Landon absconded with them.

The biggest part of the jumbled paperwork was mostly familiar, but I occasionally ran into new material, like the meeting notes from the night before. Eliza’s file now had a sticky note on the cover in Trey’s handwriting: Blackmailable? I smiled, but he had a vital point. All this time, we’d been looking at Eliza as a blackmailer, but what if she’d been the one whose secrets were on the line?

Of course, that didn’t explain why she’d been hiding so much cash in a shoebox. Trey hadn’t speculated further. He had, however, taken a yellow highlighter to the forensic analysis of the murder weapon. Another sticky note: why not disposed of?

Another excellent point. How stupid was it for Bulldog to stash the murder weapon and her purse in his truck? Why not toss it all in the Hooch? And why hadn’t he used any of her credit cards? Admittedly, that would have made him easier to trace, but he hadn’t impressed me as a big-picture kind of felon.

It was all damn confusing. I didn’t have a criminal mind; how was I supposed to comprehend the whacked-out functions of such a thing? I couldn’t even figure out Trey’s head, and I had brain scans on that one.

Okay, I thought, what if Eliza had been taking hush money. And if the money alone hadn’t convinced her, what if someone had dropped hints that her own secrets would be exposed to the Beaumonts?

And what if she’d decided that, finally, she’d had enough? That would explain why she’d come to Eric, asking questions about client confidentiality. It would explain her nervousness, her frantic pull between speaking out and safety. I remembered the bruises that had been inflicted on her two days before her death, long before Bulldog admitted to getting rough with her on Thursday night. Apparently, she’d been right to be afraid, but it hadn’t been Bulldog alone who inspired that fear.

As for Bulldog, he claimed to know nothing about Dylan Flint. I was betting Dylan had known nothing about Bulldog. And the Beaumonts knew nothing about anything. They occupied their own rarefied penthouse far above such sordid goings-on, and yet everywhere I looked, the Beaumont name ran though the mess like a fault line.

I paged through the rest of Trey’s notes and found another police report, the one on the discovery of Dylan’s body. It gave me goosebumps. He’d been yelling at me on the sidewalk and dripping-wet-dead less than ten hours later. He hadn’t made it in to talk to the cops.

Which made another fact even more alarming—Nikki had disappeared. When police went to question her about Dylan, her apartment was empty, with evidence of a hasty packing job. I felt a cold splotch of dread. Would they be pulling her from the river next?

The rest of Trey’s stuff was mostly security data for the Senator’s reception—floor plans, security rolls, perimeter breakdowns, plus lots of promotional material, all of which featured a smiling Mark and Charley. I paged through the guest list, discovering a veritable Who’s Who of Atlanta’s monied elite. A separate roster catalogued Beaumont Enterprise employees who would be attending. I noticed Jake Whitaker’s name—nothing surprising there, considering his penchant for sucking up. Still, I doubted he’d show, not after getting fired.

I also found a hefty file on Senator Adams, another knot in the incestuous tangle of Beaumont World. Everyone connected to everyone else by less than six degrees of separation—more like two and three-quarters. This wasn’t the usual political fluff ’n’ stuff, however. This was a well-researched dossier with a lot of background data, most of it irrelevant to the current situation.

Except.

And it was one hell of an except. I took up the highlighter and marked the name, then I underlined it. Then I drew an asterisk beside it. And then another.

And then Trey’s phone rang. It was Landon.

“I’m coming up,” he said.

“No, you’re not. I’m coming down.”

“Don’t start.”

“This isn’t starting. Starting would be loading whatever gun I can find and waiting for your ass to show up at this door.”

There was silence at the other end of the phone. He wasn’t happy, but couldn’t find a way around the situation.

“In the lobby then. Ten minutes. And I want all of it. If there’s a single sheet of paper missing, so help me, I’ll—”

“Shut up, Landon. I’m not in the mood.”

“Just bring it.”

“Oh, I’m bringing it all right.”

***

Landon had planted himself in the lobby like a bad-tempered hill. “This had better be everything,” he said, looking through the folders.

“It is. Including this bunch of stuff here about you and Senator Adams, how he was your partner at the company you sold before you became partners with Marisa.”

He looked at me hard, the folders fanned in his hands. “You say that like you’re discovered something, Ms. Randolph.”

“Why’d he leave?”

“To start his own law firm. Can’t you read?”

“I read fine, especially the part about the illegal wiretaps. Your old firm was about to get into hot water thanks to Adams—spying on the wrong people, it seems.”

“The charges were dropped.”

“Lots of charges got dropped during the nineties—Atlanta was famous for it. People got rich from it.”

“I wasn’t one.”

“No, Adams was the money, you were the talent. Mr. Air Force Special Services. Luckily, Marisa swooped in with her trust fund and bailed you out. Adams leaves, she’s the new partner, the name gets changed to Phoenix, and everything blows over. And now he’s running for governor.”

“And this means what exactly?”

“It means you’ve got a personal stake in this campaign. Quid pro quo. Adams kicks a little influence your way, you toss a little top secret information his. A nice partnership.”

Landon looked at me—pleasantly, it seemed. I’d never noticed how malleable his expression was, how like a layer on top of another layer on top of something hard and fixed and smooth.

“We don’t have to like each other.”

I crossed my arms. “Good thing.”

“So cut the crap. Nobody appreciates it.”

“Eliza might have.”

When Landon spoke, his voice was not argumentative. “One thing everybody at Phoenix has in common—me, Marisa, Trey too, especially Trey—is that the work is the most important thing in our lives. Sometimes it’s the only thing. And it’s never personal. We do what we have to do.”

He turned to leave, then paused. “Ask yourself this—if you’d been the one upstairs sprawled out sick, would Trey have stayed with you? Or would he have made sure you weren’t dead, then left you there to fend for yourself while he did his job?”

He didn’t wait for a reply. Which was just as well, since I didn’t have one.