Deadfall

“Clothing?” Mercer asked. “Confirmation on the gun?”

“You guys were right about the weapon. Twenty-two-caliber Ruger,” she said. “Clothes? The shooter had a long-sleeved black tee or turtleneck and some kind of thin gloves on his hands. They were both in all black.”

“Sounds like they weren’t looking to make mistakes,” Mercer said.

“And so far as the task force can determine, they didn’t make any,” Vickee said.

“Race?” Mike asked. “Do we know anything about the race of these men?”

“We aren’t even sure they’re both men,” she said.

I put my head in my hands, elbows on the table. I was playing back the moments of the shooting, from the time I saw the DA trotting up the museum steps to approach me.

“I just put a call in to Lieutenant Peterson,” Mike said, rubbing my back. “He’ll tell Scully tonight. We just stopped at George Kwan’s house, ’cause Coop can’t get this Kwan guy out of her head, just so Scully knows.”

“How’d that go?” Vickee asked. “Did you talk to him?”

“Front step flyby. I used the ruse that we had to tie up some loose ends on the Savage investigation, since we’ve got one suspect in the wind.”

“Get anything?”

“Besides an invitation to return another time?” Mike said. “We were doing fine till Coop kind of lit a fire under his tail.”

I picked my head up from the table. “I gave him something to think about, didn’t I? If I didn’t hit a nerve, then no harm, no foul.”

“And if you did,” Mike said, “he’ll be on a not-so-slow boat to China.”

“Who had the idea to just wing it?” I asked.

“Look, why don’t we change the subject,” Mike said, obviously aware that he was losing me to darker thoughts.

“One more thing,” Vickee said. “From the commissioner. It ties in to what you’re talking about.”

I looked up.

“Vickee,” Mike said in his sternest voice. “This is something you think you have to do right now?”

“Let me just put it on the table,” she said.

“I’m ready,” I said.

“So we’ve had a team of cops going through the news footage from Monday night’s gala—the hours before the shooting.”

Nothing unusual in that.

“The planners had some of the biggest names from the fashion world there to honor Wolf Savage, and they had the most gorgeous venue in Manhattan—the Temple of Dendur—as a backdrop.”

I closed my eyes and called up the spectacular setting—before the Savage melee and before the bloodshed.

“All the local news outlets covered it, and all of them ran video in the eleven-o’clock hour,” Vickee said. “CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox 5, NY1, WPIX.”

I knew there had been cameras everywhere. But they had been focused on the fashion, not the felons. I hadn’t paid them any attention.

“That must have been what Battaglia saw,” Mike said. “Something—someone on the news that drove him to head off to the Met.”

“But he’d never have made me,” I said. “I was wearing that dress I borrowed from Joan, with a dark wig and makeup that I never use.”

“Stevie Wonder would have known it was you, Coop,” Mike said. “You looked ridiculous, but you looked like you, even in that awful getup.”

“We got television outtakes, too, Alex,” Vickee said. “Film that was shot but never aired.”

“How did you ever get outtakes?” I asked. “The networks never give them up. I’ve subpoenaed them in cases and always meet with a brick wall.”

“This is an assassination, Coop,” Mike said. “This is the murder of an elected official. Nobody’s going to stonewall the US attorney about video feed from a fashion show, for Christ’s sakes.”

I hadn’t touched the glass of wine yet, but I was ready for a large gulp.

“We were watching the clips this afternoon, Alex,” Vickee said to me. “You’re in several of them, actually, as you walked around the room, during the prelude to the show on the runway, as the guests were being seated.”

“I know what you’re going to tell me,” I said. “I’d been drinking before the show. I had a cocktail with Joan’s mother after I got dressed at her apartment, and then some of the champagne that they were passing out at the party in Dendur.”

I had probably been a bit reckless, because I thought no one there would know who I was. I was going cold turkey with my Scotch intake. If there was something to embarrass me on the tapes, I was changing my behavior faster than a lightning strike.

“Do you remember talking to anyone?”

“To anyone?” I said. I was getting as defensive with my dear friend Vickee as I’d been with Prescott. “I’m sure I was perfectly sociable. I greeted lots of people.”

“You heard Mike mention Anna Wintour,” Vickee said.

“Yes.”

“Do you remember seeing her there?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “She had the best seat in the house. Fifty-yard line, front row.”

“Did you talk to her?” Vickee asked.

“That would be crazy,” I said, snapping at Vickee and pulling my hand away from Mike. “I don’t know Anna Wintour.”

“You were circling the room,” Vickee said. “Remember that?”

“Sure. Sure I do.”

“When you reached the point where Wintour was sitting, you stopped,” Vickee said. “You stopped cold in your tracks.”

“I did?”

Vickee looked at Mike. She seemed unhappy to be pressing me, but he nodded at her, and so she went on.

“You leaned in to say something to someone, didn’t you?”

“You must know,” I said. “You were watching outtakes.”

“Well, it’s just that most of the cameras were focused on Anna Wintour before the show started,” Vickee said, offering me a warm smile. “You happened to be in a lot of those shots, and this one got airtime. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Go for it, Vickee,” I said. All I recalled was swallowed in a haze.

“There was a man sitting next to Wintour. You leaned over and it looks like your lips were moving, Alex. You spoke to one of them,” Vickee said. “Did you know the man?”

I bit my lip and stared at Stephane’s face—over Vickee’s back—as he prepared a Caesar salad from scratch for diners at the next table.

I must have noticed who had the seat next to Anna Wintour on Monday night. It was prime real estate at the show. But I couldn’t call it up for the life of me.

“I must have said ‘excuse me’ as I passed by,” I said. “Maybe I stepped on her foot.”

Vickee glanced at Mike again, then at me. “You were behind them, Alex—nowhere near their feet. You leaned over to say something to one of them.”

She was trying to feed me the information, but I wasn’t picking up any of the signals.

“I wish I could help you,” I said. “All of you. I mean, it would help me, too, if I knew what made Battaglia leave home and come after me.”

Vickee reached into her tote again. She pulled out an eight-by-ten photograph, then reached across the table, moved my plate, and placed it in front of me.

“That’s a still of the camera shot,” she said. “See yourself?”

“I do.”

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