No, he was only trying to urinate into the airsickness bag. Mostly he was missing. Mostly he was spraying the back of seat 33D and into the space between the seats, showering the passengers’ arms and laps. And the kid was, apparently, a camel. Cassie and Jackson both commanded the woman to stop the child, and then they yelled at the boy to stop, but this was a tsunami. The grandmother either didn’t speak English or was pretending not to speak English, and she did not pull up the boy’s pants until, without question, he was done. From the passengers came a cacophony of curses and groans, a choral keening of disgust. The teen girl in seat 33E was in tears as she struggled to extricate herself from a very damp orange hoodie. “Ewwww,” she sobbed each time she exhaled, a plaintive, almost biblical ululation.
Cassie chastised the grandmother, telling her that what she had done was absolutely unacceptable. The old woman ignored her, clipped shut the folds at the top of the airsickness bag, and then handed it to her, smiling as if she were presenting Cassie with a bakery bag full of cookies.
* * *
? ?
Cassie knew that newspapers put stories online well before the actual paper went to print, so she guessed she shouldn’t have been surprised when she saw the photo of herself on the New York Post website on her phone on the Airporter bus to Grand Central. But she was surprised. She wanted to vomit, and actually feared for a moment that she might. She was the mystery woman, the unnamed “black widow spider” who may have murdered a handsome young American money manager in Dubai. Moreover, someone had spoken with the hotel and restaurant employees, all of whom agreed that the woman they had seen with Sokolov was likely American. For the moment, everyone seemed to presume she was an American who lived in the United Arab Emirates. That’s what the waitress at the restaurant had said. She’d told the Dubai police that Alex had said something that made it clear that while he was a visitor to the Emirates, the woman he was with was not. Cassie couldn’t imagine what that was, but guessed it must have been some remark between them about how well she knew the city. She’d said something like that, because she had bid on the route often the last year and a half. In any case, the Dubai authorities were scouring the American community there, seeing who might have hooked up with him at the hotel.
She wished that Ani would call her back. She’d called the lawyer the moment she was inside the terminal and left a message.
This was water torture, she decided, this slow, relentless drip. The authorities had to work backward to get to her: they had to rule out all of the women he might have already known in the city and all of the women living there it was possible that he had met. They had to show those photos to all of his friends and all of his business associates. They were probably showing them to the people he worked with at Unisphere in America. And so it felt like it was taking forever for them to, once and for all, focus only on her.
But she knew this: whatever was coming was getting closer.
* * *
? ?
When she got home, she finally connected with Ani. She rolled her suitcase into her bedroom and collapsed onto the couch to look up at the Empire State Building through windows speckled with city grime and summer grit. The sky was blue, however, and though it was August now and the days were noticeably shorter than a month ago, the sun was still high.
“How was Rome?” Ani asked.
“Not glamorous. I stayed at the hotel. I didn’t feel like going out.” She took a breath and said, “I’ve seen the pictures on the New York Post website.”
“Yup. They weren’t online yet when I called you. But I’ve seen them, too. I rather doubt it will be a front-page story in the paper edition tomorrow. It was Dubai, after all.”
“That’s the bright side.”
“Yes. But I have good news.”
And instantly she knew what Ani was about to say, and she closed her eyes and realized she was crying. Again. And she didn’t care. It was as if she had just gotten a call from a doctor about a biopsy and it was negative, and the doctor was explaining that she didn’t have cancer. “Go on,” she said.
“Highly unlikely you’ll be extradited. That amendment I told you about? An American citizen is indeed exempt.”
“That means I could only be extradited to Dubai if I weren’t American?”
“Correct.”
“So, then, what’s next?”
“Call back the FBI, but tell them nothing. Nothing. Say things like I don’t remember. Let me think about it. If they insist on seeing you—and they might—I’ll go with you and we’ll meet with them together.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Want to see you? I think a lot depends on who Alex Sokolov really was or how well connected the family really is. Frankly, I’m more than a little shocked that the FBI seems to be so deeply involved. I’ve done my homework now, and Dubai doesn’t need the FBI. They’re not amateurs. They know what they’re doing.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve also done a little more research into Sokolov.”
Cassie held her phone against her ear with her shoulder and blew her nose almost silently. “And?”
“And everything suggests he really was a hedge fund manager. Yes, he’s based in New York, but all the money runs through the Caribbean.”
“What does that mean?”
“It could mean nothing. It could mean anything. Whenever the money goes through a place like Grand Cayman, you have to wonder. The U.S. can’t track it as easily—if at all. The Treasury Department has something called an OFAC list. It’s a whole bunch of seriously sketchy foreign nationals or groups, and American banks or funds can’t accept money from any of them. So if you want to work with those characters, you have to work through the Caribbean.”
“So he was doing something shady?” Cassie asked. “The FBI believes he was involved with people on that list?”
“Maybe.”
“Is that why he was killed?”
“Well, we wouldn’t kill him for that. If he was doing something illegal, I kind of think we’d just arrest him.”
“So why did…they…kill him?”
“Maybe he was stealing,” Ani answered, and Cassie found herself relieved that the lawyer hadn’t begun her response, even in jest, with something along the lines of Assuming you didn’t kill him? “You know, skimming off the top,” she continued. “Or maybe he was running some Ponzi scheme and he went too far. Got in too deep.”
“Good God, if no one slashed Bernie Madoff’s throat, why would the investors take out poor Alex? What he did had to have been small potatoes by comparison.”
“We don’t know it was small potatoes. We just don’t. There could be a lot of Russian money in that fund. You don’t steal from the Russians. I’m Armenian, trust me. I know. They can be seriously badass.”
“He just didn’t seem like the type.”
“When people need money or love money, they sometimes make very bad decisions,” she reminded Cassie. Then: “The family published his first full obituary. You can find it online. It’s in the Charlottesville Progress. Here are a few things I learned that are not in the obit: Grandfather emigrated here from the Soviet Union when Stalin was still Stalin: 1951. Unsure precisely how. He was a soldier in the Second World War. Self-made man after he got here. Settled in Virginia. Became a lawyer and married a good southern girl with money. I’ve already had a private investigator do a little digging. I’m going to have him do a little more.”
“Can I afford that?”
“No. But he won’t go crazy. I just want to learn a bit about the family and about Alex. See what sorts of interests he might have had.”
“Business interests?”
“Yes. It might be helpful to discover precisely what was in the fund. But I was thinking personal interests, too.”
“Can you tell me more?” Cassie asked.
“No, but only because there isn’t anything more to tell at this point.”
“What about Miranda?”
“What about her?”
“Did you find out anything more about her?”
“Like does she really work with Alex or does she or her family really have money in this magical fund?” asked Ani.
“Yes.”
“Unisphere Asset Management has easily six or seven hundred employees in New York, Washington, Moscow, and Dubai. None of them are named Miranda.”
“You checked?”
“My investigator did, yes.”
“Can he find out if she’s an investor?”
“Maybe. But I’m not confident.”
“Is it possible she made up the name?”