She logged off her computer and tried to slip into place the last pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but there were too many and she was too tired. And so she willed herself to relax. She thumbed through the Italian and British fashion magazines she had bought at a kiosk on the street and read news stories on her tablet. But she kept coming back to the flight attendant and what she was supposed to do and what she had planned to do. There were just so very many ways to kill yourself. There were pills and there was bleeding out in the bath. There was falling from great heights and falling into oceans or rivers or deep, beautiful chasms. There were streetcars and subways and buses. There was hanging. There were guns—just so many kinds of guns.
She considered it likely that an absolute train wreck such as Cassandra Bowden might have one last surprise for her. If she had to bet, she would bet on the bartender; after all, he combined Bowden’s two principal interests in one tidy package. That, of course, would be a disaster. The last thing she wanted was him, too, on her conscience. Unfortunately, a murder-suicide involving Cassandra Bowden and some Italian hookup would look just as plausible to the world as a suicide, and it was possible that they might ask this of her.
She had promised herself a few days alone in Sochi when she was done, though of course she would not be completely alone. No doubt, some of her father’s old friends would come by. There would be someone who was long out of the loop and didn’t know how badly she had screwed up with the flight attendant. Maybe it would be someone who knew only that Sokolov was dead and wanted to thank her. It was pretty simple: you went for the jugular. It was—to use their old joke—cut and dried.
But she’d have plenty of time to watch the bears from the porch and listen to the owls as she dozed beneath the pergola. She would try to regain her emotional equilibrium after Diyarbakir and Dubai and now Rome.
She sat back against the headboard and closed her eyes, savoring the air conditioning in her hotel room but agitated because of all the things that she didn’t know and all the things it was possible they had chosen not to tell her.
26
In the hotel lobby, Cassie took a seat on a plush, ruby-red Renaissance fainting couch, perching herself on the end that was backless. She smiled at the concierge. She smiled at the handsome guy in the dark suit and earpiece who was clearly hotel security.
“So, are you in your room?” Ani was asking.
“Yes,” she lied.
“Good. I’m sure there are reporters ferreting out from the airline where you are. Someone will find your hotel. That’s another good reason to lay low.”
“Really? The crime occurred in Dubai, not Perugia or Rome. Why would an Italian reporter care?”
“Why would any reporter care? Sex and murder.”
“Oh. Of course.”
“I heard back from my investigator.”
“About the passenger manifests?”
“No. He doubts he can get us much there. But he has done some other nosing around.”
Cassie listened carefully, trying to focus. “And?”
“Here are a few of the things he learned. Remember what I told you the other day about the sorts of people who invest in that fund?”
“Yes. You said a lot of them are Russian.”
“Right. There are a couple on the Treasury Department’s OFAC list. Apparently a few are the sort of oligarchs who are just crazy wealthy. Some, he believes, are ex-KGB. Those are guys who made ridiculous amounts of money in the years after the Soviet Union collapsed. He thinks it’s possible that the FBI is investigating Unisphere and that particular fund.”
“Because Sokolov was killed?”
“No. In this case, the FBI was already looking into the company because of the investors. Who they are.”
“I see.”
“But they may have been investigating Sokolov himself. Maybe he was mismanaging the fund: taking a little extra for himself. Or maybe, like I said, it was a Ponzi scheme. Maybe he was only delivering the returns these folks had come to expect by bringing new people into the fund, and he finally went too far.”
“Why would the FBI care if he’s only stealing from Russians and the money’s in the Caribbean?”
“Unisphere is an American company, and Sokolov may have been committing fraud. For all we know, some of the Russian investors live in America and are totally clean.”
“And so he thinks it was some Russian thug who killed Alex?”
“Could be,” said Ani. “Remember: you mislead those guys or you steal from those guys and you’re a dead man.”
“The Internet trolls have been saying for days that Alex was a spy. Is that still possible?”
“Yes, very possible. If Sokolov wasn’t a crook or playing fast and loose with other people’s money, then perhaps he was an embedded operative.”
“For us?”
“Or them. If us, Unisphere is his cover because we know who some of the investors are and we know of their connections to the Russian president. If them, Unisphere is his cover because he can live and work easily in the U.S. and then meet without suspicion with these folks. He can be their little messenger boy or—I guess this is the term they use—courier. So that fellow you met in seat two C? He was just as likely one of ours as he was one of theirs. Or maybe he was playing both sides. My guy says that’s a possibility, too. Maybe that’s how he got himself killed. Nothing’s ever really black or white, is it? Maybe he was just a little nasty.”
Cassie thought about this, about the man she had slept with in Dubai. “But Ani? He didn’t seem like a crook or a nasty guy. I’ve met my share of—forgive me—pricks, and he didn’t seem like one.”
“Well, if you’re stealing, you don’t want to advertise that now, do you? Same with being a spy. You don’t exactly give out business cards with your real occupation.”
“I guess not,” Cassie agreed.
“Now, Sokolov left behind none of the footprints that scream spook. No Langley, no State Department connections, no friends at embassies.”
“But he did have family that originally came from the Soviet Union.”
“Yes.”
“So maybe it’s more likely he was a Russian spy,” Cassie murmured.
“Maybe. Now”—Ani paused, clearing her throat—“we do have the full coroner’s report from Dubai.”
Cassie noticed how her lawyer had halted briefly midsentence, the way she had almost reflexively stalled. “It’s bad news, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s actually pretty good. It really is. But there are also some wrinkles that are curious.”
She rested her forehead in her hand and closed her eyes. She waited.
“The body was found at five in the afternoon. The blood was mostly dry. Apparently gastric emptying time is four hours, maybe five because of the alcohol, and his stomach was completely empty. So, he was definitely killed before one in the afternoon, and probably before noon. Probably before lunch. But the room was sixty-five degrees. The body really wasn’t—forgive me—bubbling up. It wasn’t bloated, and it was just starting to decompose.”
She shuddered, unsure whether it was general disgust or sadness at the specificity of Sokolov’s mortal deterioration. “This all sounds promising,” she said, “though forgive me if I can’t get overly excited at the vision of the poor guy’s body decomposing in the bed where we slept.”
“It is promising. Focus on that. If Dubai wants to prosecute or the Sokolov family wants to go after you in civil court, you can argue convincingly that he was still alive when you left the room. They can’t prove otherwise.”
“Well, okay then,” Cassie said, but she knew the truth. If she needed a defense, like so much else in her life, its foundation would be a lie. She wondered if her voice was as dead in reality as it sounded in her head. She understood all too well why this news hadn’t made her happier.
“But here’s the thing,” Ani continued. “According to the report, this was done—and this is my word, not theirs—professionally. Whoever killed Alex slashed the carotid artery. Knew right where it was. They severed the trachea. He was gone in thirty seconds. I’m sure, Cassie, you are completely capable of killing a person with a knife or broken bottle or even a letter opener while he’s asleep, but it would not be so—forgive me—efficient. So surgical. It would not happen so fast. Do you even know where the carotid artery is?”
She stared down at the swirls in the Oriental carpet below her. She saw her toes in her sandals. The pink of the nail polish. “No. I really don’t.”
“I mean, even if this was one of your worst blackout moments ever and you really did kill the guy, I think it would have been pretty damn messy.”