Prescott called my name and I turned back to see what he wanted.
“I think you’re right, Alex,” he said. “I’m going to tell Chidra to be in my office Monday afternoon with Swenson. There’s no point giving her the chance to back out of it.”
“I’m all for that.”
“I might as well let her know now,” he said.
I watched as the flight attendant raised the staircase and the pilots fired up the engines and started to roll to the runway.
“I think she does know already, James. I think she figured it out all by herself.”
The smart-looking jet was on its way to airborne as soon as the tower gave the pilot the all clear to take off.
“Where’s that plane going?” Mike asked the two men in blue overalls who must have been the ground crew.
“Gander, Newfoundland,” one of them said.
“Gander,” I said. “Gateway to Europe.”
“She’s got enough fuel to make it there—two and a half hours,” the workman said. “Then refuel for the trip to London.”
“Whatever we asked her,” I said to Prescott, “she spooks more easily than sheep.”
“I don’t get it, Alex. The district attorney was going to be handling a case about supposed thieves in her company,” he said. “She was Battaglia’s witness, for Christ’s sakes.”
“You’ve got that wrong,” I said. “Some of the haze is lifting, I think. She wasn’t Battaglia’s witness at all. Chidra Persaud was his snitch.”
THIRTY-NINE
I was back in my cell at Three Sisters. But at least I had Mike with me, and a thick deli sandwich, and a cooler with a chilled bottle of my favorite Chardonnay—Au Bon Climat.
Prescott had called ahead to give Tinsley and North the night off. They were instructed to return at noon on Sunday.
“What a stunt,” I said. “Taking off to London without a bit of notice, and no way to stop her. She’s running from Prescott—from this investigation. That much is certain.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice to know why?” Mike said.
I kept thinking of the playback of Battaglia’s phone messages to me the night he was killed, the night he came after me on the steps of the Met. He had worked himself up over Diana—asking me what I knew about her, telling me that she was none of my business. At this moment—other than connecting that name to Chidra Persaud and a hunt club—I had no more of an idea than I had when I heard the calls in Prescott’s office.
“Go back to my ‘ghost’ theory,” I said. “If I got nothing else out of the trip, I got that by stumbling along with Karl Jansen.”
“It’s got possibilities,” Mike said, “but Persaud dragged Prescott a long way just to see the scenery.”
“And he dragged me,” I said. “She wanted him out of town for a reason. Did anything at all happen yesterday that would affect the case?”
“Battaglia’s murder?” Mike asked. “I haven’t heard anything from anyone. I doubt it.”
“Maybe Persaud wanted to defang James Prescott,” I said. “Her tax investigation is going to end up in his lap—Battaglia had no business entertaining it. It’s a federal case, after all. Now he’ll have to recuse himself.”
“So the trip could have been a total red herring,” Mike said. “Pretty clever of her.”
“Devious, too. But I think it was more than that.”
“Why?”
“When Prescott came to Three Sisters to get me in the middle of the night, he told me that he had talked to Amy Battaglia. That she insisted the DA’s trip involved a case.”
“So what was Chidra snitching about?”
“I think she must have been looking for leverage against possible prosecution.”
“On the theory that if she was defrauding the Brits, she was playing fast and loose with her tax issues here?” Mike asked.
“Probably so,” I said. “It’s entirely like Charles Swenson to have her bat her eyelashes at Battaglia and for him to bring her in as a possible victim. Make a preemptive strike.”
“Swenson’s close enough to Battaglia that he might have encouraged the trip to Montana,” Mike said. “Who do you think Chidra was ratting out?”
“Well, there’s the mystery man—the guy Battaglia was supposed to bring for the bighorn sheep hunt,” I said. “And I can’t stop wondering about George Kwan.”
“Does Chidra know him?”
“She denied that. But she says he was trying to work some kind of merger with her business. She refused to team up with him.”
“So—?”
“So maybe her ‘due diligence’ turned up dirt on Kwan Enterprises,” I said. “Maybe that was to be her ace in the hole if Battaglia turned on her.”
“Wish you had asked her more about it.”
“I didn’t have a clue that might be the case until she pulled that fast one at the airport and disappeared into the wild blue yonder.”
“Look on the bright side. At least you got the ghost news,” Mike said. “Let’s see where we go with that.”
“Did you and Catherine turn up anything on Tiger Tail?” I asked, biting into my sandwich.
Mike was uncorking the wine and pouring it into the plastic cups—no glass allowed in the psych ward—from my bathroom.
“All the public information is homogenized. Wall Street Journal profile of Persaud, lots of articles about her in the foreign press, active presence on social media. All created to enhance her image,” Mike said, coming back into the room and handing me a cup.
“What about the company?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full. I can’t understand you.”
I swallowed hard. “Tiger Tail? How about the business side of things?”
“Almost one year ago, the British tabloids started in on her tax troubles,” Mike said. “But it all simmered down within months.”
“I’d love to link that to the point in time Charles Swenson brought her in to meet Battaglia.”
“Good luck,” he said. “Catherine came up empty.”
“What do you mean?”
“She called the chief of the Frauds Bureau—Mimi Hershenson—like you asked her to, and she’s got no record of Chidra Persaud—not as a witness, not as a target. Mimi’s not aware of any pending appointment with the woman.”
“Damn. I should have gone right to Rose Malone,” I said.
Rose had been Battaglia’s executive assistant for his entire tenure. She was my good friend, often alerting me—like an early warning system—to his dark moods, encouraging me to wait a day or two when I was asking for professional favors. He trusted her with every secret he had ever held close to his chest.
“That window has closed for the moment,” Mike said.
“Why?”
Rose would have been as devastated as anyone in Paul Battaglia’s family by his death. In my own self-involved mourning, I hadn’t even called her.