“They are going to confirm the approximate time of death with the coroner in Dubai. They won’t know the definitive time, but if they can show it was before ten forty-five in the morning, you are fucked. Pardon my French, Cassie, but you are fucked.”
Then they stood in silence for a moment, and Cassie thought she might get sick right there on the street. She looked down at the sidewalk and took a few slow, deep breaths to compose herself. Maybe she was self-destructing because she knew on some level that she had in fact killed him, and she was craving punishment. Justice. Across the street was a bar with a neon sign with a four-leaf clover. “Please,” she said, her voice quavering as she pointed at it. “I’ve got to have a drink. I really, really do.”
* * *
? ?
In a voice that was quiet but intense, a fioritura of frustration and fury only barely mollified by the gin and tonic she was finishing in great gulps, Ani explained to Cassie what she believed was likely to happen next, all of it contingent only on the time it would take for three people to connect as midnight neared on the Arabian Peninsula: the FBI’s legal attaché in the United Emirates, his connection at the Dubai police, and the coroner in that massive city by the sea. Last week, Ani said, after Alex Sokolov was found, the medical examiner had autopsied the body. He—and in Dubai, Ani supposed, it was more likely a male than a female coroner—had seen how much (if any) of the veal from dinner remained in Alex Sokolov’s stomach, taken the body’s temperature, and checked to see how far rigor mortis had progressed.
“I don’t know a hell of a lot about forensic entomology, but I can also see them examining the bugs that are starting to eat at the guy’s corpse. There probably weren’t beetles and there certainly weren’t maggots yet, but there may have been houseflies,” Ani said. “In any case, the coroner will have offered an approximate time of death.”
Cassie had downed a shot of tequila as soon as they arrived, and the warmth had helped. It was pretty good tequila. Smooth. She was calmer now, at least a little bit. The tequila reminded her of Buckley and dancing barefoot in the bar, a memory that was growing sweeter and fuzzier with time. She was almost done with the margarita she had ordered immediately upon finishing the shot. “You said it would be an approximate time of death. That means there’s a window. Do you know how big that window is? Are we talking an hour? Three hours? Five, maybe?” she asked. She sat back in her stool and swiveled so she was facing Ani. Sometimes she really enjoyed a place like this: dark paneling and little light, not quite a dive, but a far cry from Bemelmans at the Carlyle. There was a pair of older men in drab brown suits at the far end of the bar, but they were the only other customers here this time of the afternoon.
“Probably in the neighborhood of two or three,” Ani replied. “But decomposition isn’t really in my wheelhouse. It could be more. It could be less.”
“They found the body late in the afternoon, right?”
“Yes.”
A notion was floating just beyond Cassie’s reach. She thought she might be able to reel it in if she could talk the idea through. “So let’s say Alex was found at five p.m. You and I know he was killed before I woke up, and that was around nine forty-five in the morning. If the window is three hours, let’s hope he was killed an hour or so before I first opened my eyes.”
“Don’t get your hopes up. By eight forty-five in the morning, there were people in the hallways: Housekeeping. Guests checking out. Guests going to breakfast. No one commits a murder in a hotel room if they have to run a gauntlet of guests and maids.”
“There was no one around when I left the room about ten forty-five. And even if there were people in the hallways earlier in the day, doesn’t that help my case? People coming and going? A crowd? Maybe whoever did it counted on the crowds.”
Ani folded her arms across her chest: “I said there would be people. I didn’t say there would be crowds. I seriously doubt that the fifth floor of the Royal Phoenician is ever Penn Station.”
“Still. All we need is the window to work in our favor.”
“And to be big. Really big. Think picture-window big, Cassie.”
She nodded hopefully. “And they’re going to try and find Miranda now, right?”
“Yes. They will.”
Cassie was disturbed by the cadence of Ani’s words. “You make it sound like there’s a but coming.”
“There is. We already know there’s no woman named Miranda who worked with Sokolov. There’s no Miranda at Unisphere Asset Management.”
“So?”
“What if there’s no Miranda anywhere in his life?”
“Look, I didn’t make her up. I’ll admit, Alex barely knew her—if at all. I told you, maybe she’s just a friend or relative of an investor.”
The bartender glanced at the two of them, and Ani grew alert. Cassie understood that her lawyer wanted her to lower her voice.
“Another round?” he asked the two of them.
“No, thank you,” Ani told him, and Cassie felt a pang of disappointment. Then her lawyer took a deep breath and said to her, “You drink too much. You pass out. You black out. And you are, by your own admission, a liar. You lie all the time.”
The words hung in the air, revealing and hurtful. “I thought you believed me,” Cassie murmured. She could hear the devastation, almost childlike, in her response. It was as if Ani had betrayed her.
“You’re not even sure you believe you,” Ani said quietly.
“Sometimes!” she shot back. “Most of the time I am absolutely confident: I did not kill him.”
“Fine,” said Ani. “Fine. If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think you did, either. Does that help or make a difference? Not at all. Let’s hope there is evidence in the hotel room that this Miranda person exists.”
“There will be. Won’t her DNA be there?”
“It’s a hotel room. There’s DNA from a hundred—a thousand—guests in there.”
“Of course,” she agreed, but then an idea came to her. “Her DNA might be on the glass she used. So might her fingerprints. I wiped the glasses down, but who knows how thorough I was. I was kind of panicking.”
“Aside from the reality that wiping down a couple of glasses just screams guilt, how do they compare the DNA to a person they can’t even find? How do they compare the fingerprints? It’s not like there’s a database of DNA and fingerprints of people who say their name is Miranda.”
“I see…”
“I just don’t know what you were thinking when you volunteered the information to the FBI that you slept with the guy and spent the night in his suite. I am just…incredulous.”
“Either I wasn’t thinking, or I was thinking they already knew from the photos that I had spent the night with Alex and they were going to find my DNA or my fingerprints or my stupid lipstick in the room somewhere. I honestly don’t know which.”
“You are making the assumption that you’re even going to allow them to swab your cheek to get your DNA. Or take your fingerprints. I will still try and stall that for a very long time, but you have made my job that much more difficult.”
“I’m sorry. I really am.”
Ani’s face went a little pensive. “You said the day we met that the cuts on your hands were from a broken glass. Were they?”
“Yes. What are you suggesting? Do you think I tried to kill myself?”
“No, of course not. They were on your hands, not your wrists. I was thinking defense wounds. You were trying to protect yourself. You were fighting off a knife or that broken bottle. Tell me honestly: did Sokolov attack you at some point that night? Maybe—forgive me, I have to ask—some sort of creepy sex play that got out of hand?”
“He never attacked me, Ani, at least that I can recall. But that doesn’t sound like him. He was…”
“Go on.”
“He was really good in bed. It was our first time, and he was pretty gentle. Those cuts on my hands? I saw a Dubai news article with the two security camera photos of me, and I dropped the wineglass I was holding. It was in my bathroom the night before we met.”
“You even drink in the bathroom?”